Kregg Hetherington | Concordia University (Canada) (original) (raw)

Books by Kregg Hetherington

CEADUC, 2023

Traducción de The Government of Beans (2020). Traducción por Silvia Jawerbaum y Julieta Barba.

Duke University Press, 2020

The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state... more The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America's new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.

Introduction available online at Duke University Press

Duke University Press, 2019

Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate cha... more Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future.

Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehlmann, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Wakefield, Austin Zeiderman

Auditores Campesinos es la traducción al español de "Guerrilla Auditors," hecha por Carolina Cast... more Auditores Campesinos es la traducción al español de "Guerrilla Auditors," hecha por Carolina Castillo con correcciones de Alejandra Estigarribia y Kregg Hetherington. La traducción cuenta con un nuevo epílogo que responde a los cambios políticos en el país desde la publicación en inglés.

El libro es un relato etnográfico del surgimiento de los conceptos de la información, la transparencia y el buen gobierno en el periodo de post Guerra Fría y los efectos de estos conceptos en la transición a la democracia en el Paraguay. Kregg Hetherington muestra que el ideal de información transparente, pensado para despolitizar los procedimiento burocráticos, se volvió un campo de batalla de un nuevo tipo de política, centrado en la interpretación legal y el manejo de documentos estatales. A finales del siglo XX, en Paraguay, las estrategias campesinas en la lucha por la tierra se desplazaron inesperadamente del campo a lo más hondo de la burocracia. Cuando los campesinos, los burócratas y los expertos en desarrollo confluyeron en los archivos del EStado, sobrevinieron los conflictos sobre cómo debería funcional la burocracia, para qué sirven los documentos y quién narra el pasado y futuro de la nación. Hetherington sositene que la democracia neoliberal del Paraguay está fundada, al menos en parte, en una distinción excluyente entre ciudadanos modelos y campesinos. A pesar de esto, los activistas campesinos han encontrado maneras de salvar su exclusión y al hacerlo cuestionan las bases conceptuales de la ortodoxia del desarrollo internacional.

Papers by Kregg Hetherington

Social Studies of Science, 2023

This article is about a brief controversy that erupted in 2015 around the City of Montreal’s plan... more This article is about a brief controversy that erupted in 2015 around the City of Montreal’s plan to divert 8 billion liters of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River while it conducted critical maintenance on its sewer infrastructure. In the end, though, the Flush was non-eventful: It went ahead as planned and with no lasting effects or complaints. We suggest that the best way to understand how the City averted the crisis is through the concept of ‘affective maintenance’. If infrastructures are meant to be uneventful (i.e. narratively stable and generally lacking in surprise ruptures) then the maintenance of public affect is as important to their functioning as the physical work that keeps sewage flowing in the right direction.

Besky S and Blanchette A (eds) How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 41–58., 2019

The well-known story of biopolitics tells us that as Europe urbanized, security was increasingly ... more The well-known story of biopolitics tells us that as Europe urbanized, security was increasingly linked to human well-being. What the story tends to leave out is the way that biopolitics also depended on the expansion of monocrop agriculture: the thriving of human populations was enabled by the thriving of non-human food crops, especially grains. As a result, new human diseases were also shadowed by new plant diseases, and a whole other, parallel governmental apparatus built to manage the crop health in rural Europe. During the great postwar development initiative known as the Green Revolution, plant health techniques would be expanded to the Global South in a massive realignment of biopolitical relations. Though the core tradition of biopolitical thought rarely made it explicit, biopolitics was always, in other words, agribiopolitics, a political technique that made certain populations of humans thrive alongside companion crops. Using Paraguay as a site of genealogical engagement, this paper explores agribiopolitical relations through three phases of the Green Revolution, culminating in the current age of monocrops.

Keywords of the Anthropocene, 2019

This paper is a study of civil service reform in Paraguay during the tumultuous government of Fer... more This paper is a study of civil service reform in Paraguay during the tumultuous government of Fernando Lugo, 2008-2012. On its own merits, the reform was one of the government’s greatest successes. But in this paper, I show that it also had inadvertent effects which were detrimental to the rural poor, or campesinos, who made up a major portion of Lugo’s political coalition. I argue that Lugo’s campesino allies in fact lost twice as a result of this reform. The first loss was perhaps predictable: by insisting on merit-based civil service appointments over patronage appointments, Lugo’s government made it harder for those with lower educations to accede to the traditional short-term benefits of electoral victory: government jobs. The second was more subtle. That by creating an implicit division between experts and clients in the civil service, and by putting a premium on the former, Lugo’s government participated in increasing the influence of campesinos’ primary enemies, the massive soy farms overtaking the agrarian frontier.

Paraguay desde las ciencias sociales, 2016

Cultural Anthropology 28(1), Feb 2013

This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), ... more This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay’s rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay’s modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity.

en Capitalismo: terra e poder na America Latina (1982-2012). Vol.1, Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Par... more en Capitalismo: terra e poder na America Latina (1982-2012). Vol.1, Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Paraguay y Uruguay. pp. 173-214. Editores Guillermo Almeyra, João Márcio Mendes Pereira, Luciano Concheiro, Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves. Buenos Aires: Peña Lillo Continente y CLACSO.

Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19(2), 2014

Decades into a land reform program in eastern Paraguay, the promise of land redistribution is sti... more Decades into a land reform program in eastern Paraguay, the promise of land redistribution is still palpable in the appreciation that campesinos have for state surveyors. This mystique persists despite constant disappointment, open corruption, and abusive
paternalism. The article argues that the surveyor’s promise builds on the infrastructural logic of development: that small investments in the physical landscape can lead, eventually, tomajor social and economic changes. By unpacking this history in relation to the
last several decades of development thinking in Latin America, the article also suggests a rethinking of the concept of infrastructure for anthropology in general. The concept has long connoted a spatial dimension of built environments at the expense of the temporal dimension that gives it so much political power.

This paper argues for understanding the regulation and standardization of objects as fundamentall... more This paper argues for understanding the regulation and standardization of objects as fundamentally about “adding” to those objects rather than reducing or simplifying them. The analysis is based on the ethnographic study of regulatory politics in Paraguayan soybean production over the course of two decades in which the Paraguayan state increased its regulatory capacity immensely. By looking at very different forms of regulatory intervention, it shows that each regulatory moment
can best be understood as a “translation” which adds to the complexity of the objects in question by adding new actors and concerns to their circulation. This provides a more dynamic way of understanding the politics of regulation than more common approaches that see regulation as technical and depoliticizing.

‘Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking... more ‘Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking. In the last three decades, international development agencies have argued that Latin American land reform policy should focus not on redistributing land but on creating more information about land and making it as widely accessible as possible. These proposals, which I call ‘cadastral fixes' to rural underdevelopment, are understandably attractive and seem to fit well with democratic values of transparency and openness. But I argue that the use of the word ‘information' to connote both democratic rights and the apparatuses devised by economists to improve the rural economy is misleading. ‘Information' is productively vague, allowing development experts to change their projects in the face of failure without questioning the fundamental economic premises on which their reforms are built. As I show in this case study of Paraguayan cadastral reform, the history of these refinements shows a shift, under the rubric of open information, towards increasingly disciplinary forms of intervention in the politics of land.

CEADUC, 2023

Traducción de The Government of Beans (2020). Traducción por Silvia Jawerbaum y Julieta Barba.

Duke University Press, 2020

The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state... more The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America's new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.

Introduction available online at Duke University Press

Duke University Press, 2019

Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate cha... more Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future.

Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehlmann, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Wakefield, Austin Zeiderman

Auditores Campesinos es la traducción al español de "Guerrilla Auditors," hecha por Carolina Cast... more Auditores Campesinos es la traducción al español de "Guerrilla Auditors," hecha por Carolina Castillo con correcciones de Alejandra Estigarribia y Kregg Hetherington. La traducción cuenta con un nuevo epílogo que responde a los cambios políticos en el país desde la publicación en inglés.

El libro es un relato etnográfico del surgimiento de los conceptos de la información, la transparencia y el buen gobierno en el periodo de post Guerra Fría y los efectos de estos conceptos en la transición a la democracia en el Paraguay. Kregg Hetherington muestra que el ideal de información transparente, pensado para despolitizar los procedimiento burocráticos, se volvió un campo de batalla de un nuevo tipo de política, centrado en la interpretación legal y el manejo de documentos estatales. A finales del siglo XX, en Paraguay, las estrategias campesinas en la lucha por la tierra se desplazaron inesperadamente del campo a lo más hondo de la burocracia. Cuando los campesinos, los burócratas y los expertos en desarrollo confluyeron en los archivos del EStado, sobrevinieron los conflictos sobre cómo debería funcional la burocracia, para qué sirven los documentos y quién narra el pasado y futuro de la nación. Hetherington sositene que la democracia neoliberal del Paraguay está fundada, al menos en parte, en una distinción excluyente entre ciudadanos modelos y campesinos. A pesar de esto, los activistas campesinos han encontrado maneras de salvar su exclusión y al hacerlo cuestionan las bases conceptuales de la ortodoxia del desarrollo internacional.

Social Studies of Science, 2023

This article is about a brief controversy that erupted in 2015 around the City of Montreal’s plan... more This article is about a brief controversy that erupted in 2015 around the City of Montreal’s plan to divert 8 billion liters of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River while it conducted critical maintenance on its sewer infrastructure. In the end, though, the Flush was non-eventful: It went ahead as planned and with no lasting effects or complaints. We suggest that the best way to understand how the City averted the crisis is through the concept of ‘affective maintenance’. If infrastructures are meant to be uneventful (i.e. narratively stable and generally lacking in surprise ruptures) then the maintenance of public affect is as important to their functioning as the physical work that keeps sewage flowing in the right direction.

Besky S and Blanchette A (eds) How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 41–58., 2019

The well-known story of biopolitics tells us that as Europe urbanized, security was increasingly ... more The well-known story of biopolitics tells us that as Europe urbanized, security was increasingly linked to human well-being. What the story tends to leave out is the way that biopolitics also depended on the expansion of monocrop agriculture: the thriving of human populations was enabled by the thriving of non-human food crops, especially grains. As a result, new human diseases were also shadowed by new plant diseases, and a whole other, parallel governmental apparatus built to manage the crop health in rural Europe. During the great postwar development initiative known as the Green Revolution, plant health techniques would be expanded to the Global South in a massive realignment of biopolitical relations. Though the core tradition of biopolitical thought rarely made it explicit, biopolitics was always, in other words, agribiopolitics, a political technique that made certain populations of humans thrive alongside companion crops. Using Paraguay as a site of genealogical engagement, this paper explores agribiopolitical relations through three phases of the Green Revolution, culminating in the current age of monocrops.

Keywords of the Anthropocene, 2019

This paper is a study of civil service reform in Paraguay during the tumultuous government of Fer... more This paper is a study of civil service reform in Paraguay during the tumultuous government of Fernando Lugo, 2008-2012. On its own merits, the reform was one of the government’s greatest successes. But in this paper, I show that it also had inadvertent effects which were detrimental to the rural poor, or campesinos, who made up a major portion of Lugo’s political coalition. I argue that Lugo’s campesino allies in fact lost twice as a result of this reform. The first loss was perhaps predictable: by insisting on merit-based civil service appointments over patronage appointments, Lugo’s government made it harder for those with lower educations to accede to the traditional short-term benefits of electoral victory: government jobs. The second was more subtle. That by creating an implicit division between experts and clients in the civil service, and by putting a premium on the former, Lugo’s government participated in increasing the influence of campesinos’ primary enemies, the massive soy farms overtaking the agrarian frontier.

Paraguay desde las ciencias sociales, 2016

Cultural Anthropology 28(1), Feb 2013

This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), ... more This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay’s rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay’s modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity.

en Capitalismo: terra e poder na America Latina (1982-2012). Vol.1, Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Par... more en Capitalismo: terra e poder na America Latina (1982-2012). Vol.1, Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Paraguay y Uruguay. pp. 173-214. Editores Guillermo Almeyra, João Márcio Mendes Pereira, Luciano Concheiro, Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves. Buenos Aires: Peña Lillo Continente y CLACSO.

Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19(2), 2014

Decades into a land reform program in eastern Paraguay, the promise of land redistribution is sti... more Decades into a land reform program in eastern Paraguay, the promise of land redistribution is still palpable in the appreciation that campesinos have for state surveyors. This mystique persists despite constant disappointment, open corruption, and abusive
paternalism. The article argues that the surveyor’s promise builds on the infrastructural logic of development: that small investments in the physical landscape can lead, eventually, tomajor social and economic changes. By unpacking this history in relation to the
last several decades of development thinking in Latin America, the article also suggests a rethinking of the concept of infrastructure for anthropology in general. The concept has long connoted a spatial dimension of built environments at the expense of the temporal dimension that gives it so much political power.

This paper argues for understanding the regulation and standardization of objects as fundamentall... more This paper argues for understanding the regulation and standardization of objects as fundamentally about “adding” to those objects rather than reducing or simplifying them. The analysis is based on the ethnographic study of regulatory politics in Paraguayan soybean production over the course of two decades in which the Paraguayan state increased its regulatory capacity immensely. By looking at very different forms of regulatory intervention, it shows that each regulatory moment
can best be understood as a “translation” which adds to the complexity of the objects in question by adding new actors and concerns to their circulation. This provides a more dynamic way of understanding the politics of regulation than more common approaches that see regulation as technical and depoliticizing.

‘Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking... more ‘Information' is an enormously promising, if ambiguous term in post-Cold War development thinking. In the last three decades, international development agencies have argued that Latin American land reform policy should focus not on redistributing land but on creating more information about land and making it as widely accessible as possible. These proposals, which I call ‘cadastral fixes' to rural underdevelopment, are understandably attractive and seem to fit well with democratic values of transparency and openness. But I argue that the use of the word ‘information' to connote both democratic rights and the apparatuses devised by economists to improve the rural economy is misleading. ‘Information' is productively vague, allowing development experts to change their projects in the face of failure without questioning the fundamental economic premises on which their reforms are built. As I show in this case study of Paraguayan cadastral reform, the history of these refinements shows a shift, under the rubric of open information, towards increasingly disciplinary forms of intervention in the politics of land.

sociologyandsocialanthropology.dal. …

Novapolis (5) 31-54, Oct 2012

Traducción y adaptación de un capitulo del libro "Guerrilla Auditors" que demuestra las relacione... more Traducción y adaptación de un capitulo del libro "Guerrilla Auditors" que demuestra las relaciones legales y políticas entre campesinos, el estado y activistas urbanos en Paraguayo, que llevaron a la asunción y después la destitución del presidente Fernando Lugo.

Journal of Peasant Studies, Jan 1, 2009

This paper offers a symptomatic reading of the 2008 World Development Report on Agriculture for D... more This paper offers a symptomatic reading of the 2008 World Development Report on Agriculture for Development by comparing it to the World Bank's previous Report on agriculture in 1982. The differences between these two reports say less about agriculture or development ...