Contribution short abstract:

Circularities and circulations are ultimately forms of movement, therefore material and tangible. This contribution argues that these qualities make them concretely existing bodies, accessible and usable by people in their life-projects.

Contribution long abstract:

Appadurai (2008) deconstructs the forms of global circulation as made of circuits, speed, and scale. These categories at once give shape and are shaped by the form of the circulation itself, and give account of its materiality and measurability. Ingold (1993) describes forms as the emergent embodiment of the cycles and rhythms that give rise to them. Thus, we can understand - and measure - circular forms as embodied responses and results of the cycles and rhythms that have generated them. Therefore, the paper contends that, as people attune themselves with the rhythms that make up a specific form of circulation, they come to be part of its materiality. Becoming carriers and factors in the degree of speed and scale that the circulation works at, they are able to use it for their life-projects.

The ethnography studies an agricultural cooperative founded in 2010 by Sahelian migrant workers who grow and sell biological products in Rome, Italy. The workers have entered circulatory metabolic channels through which the city and countryside have mutually fed each other for centuries. They have done so by attuning themselves to specific seasonal and harvesting cycles, to metabolic rhythms and infrastructures of movement. In becoming part of this circulation - carriers of its form, subject to its speed and scale - they have provisioned for their life-project. Moreover, they have also been able to orient the overall shape of the circulation, connecting it to globally circulating forms of sustainable and organic food production.