How seeds make (and unmake) relations: Affect and power in the farming world (southern Chile) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
Seeds are simultaneously a meaningful part of the daily life of many people involved in agriculture and instruments for national and international policy making. This thematic section explores the sensorial connections between people and plants, the relationships of power that impact and frame them, and the reflections and contestations that they are a part of. In the midst of Western societies and among scientists and farmers, different ontologies and different perceptions of being and coevolving with others in the world coexist, as we will show by looking at human-seed relationships. Local and global legacies create powerful differences between seeds, while various forms of international governance simultaneously push seeds toward homogenization and agriculture toward industrialization while claiming to preserve diversity. Intellectual property rights over seeds and seed regulations have become powerful tools of multinational seed corporations for appropriating large parts of farmers’ incomes and controlling the food chain, while it is the sensorial and emotional connections between humans and plants that provide the drive to resist them.
Introduction: Seeds—Grown, governed, and contested, or the ontic in political anthropology
Focaal, 2014
Seeds are simultaneously a meaningful part of the daily life of many people involved in agriculture and instruments for national and international policy making. This thematic section explores the sensorial connections between people and plants, the relationships of power that impact and frame them, and the reflections and contestations that they are a part of. In the midst of Western societies and among scientists and farmers, different ontologies and different perceptions of being and coevolving with others in the world coexist, as we will show by looking at human-seed relationships. Local and global legacies create powerful differences between seeds, while various forms of international governance simultaneously push seeds toward homogenization and agriculture toward industrialization while claiming to preserve diversity. Intellectual property rights over seeds and seed regulations have become powerful tools of multinational seed corporations for appropriating large parts of farm...
Seeds are simultaneously a meaningful part of the daily life of many people involved in agriculture and instruments for national and international pol- icy making. This thematic section explores the sensorial connections between people and plants, the relationships of power that impact and frame them, and the reflections and contestations that they are a part of. In the midst of Western soci- eties and among scientists and farmers, different ontologies and different percep- tions of being and coevolving with others in the world coexist, as we will show by looking at human-seed relationships. Local and global legacies create powerful differences between seeds, while various forms of international governance simul- taneously push seeds toward homogenization and agriculture toward industrial- ization while claiming to preserve diversity. Intellectual property rights over seeds and seed regulations have become powerful tools of multinational seed corpora- tions for appropriating large parts of farmers’ incomes and controlling the food chain, while it is the sensorial and emotional connections between humans and plants that provide the drive to resist them.
Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2014
This article follows the trajectory of a French farmers’ movement that contests the seed production and regulation system set in place during agricultural modernization. It focuses on the creativity of the movement, which ranges from semantic innovations (such as “peasant seeds”) to the reinvention of onfarm breeding practices based on new scientific paradigms, and includes new alliances with the social movements defending the commons. The trajectory of the movement is shaped by its encounters—with scientists, other international seed contestations, and other social movements—and by the productive frictions they create. This in-depth reframing of the activities connected to seeds contributes to building a counternarrative about farmers and seeds that reopens spaces for contestation. In this counternarrative, “peasant seeds” play a central and subversive role in the sense that they question the ontological assumptions of present seed laws.
Food matters have become increasingly important in academic, policy and political agendas in recent years, acknowledging the coproduction of food and society: the key role food plays in sustaining society alongside its potential to be shaped by society. From concerns about where food comes from, how it is produced, what it contains and how it is marketed to concerns with how it is consumed, who can afford it, why it is wasted and where possible sites of intervention might lie, researchers have increasingly been exploring the role of food in relation to (in)security, justice, production and consumption. The political and economic tensions surrounding different modes of engagement with food, and contestations about the sites and forms of interventions (whether government policy, third sector, charitable) are tied up with more radical geo-political concerns about human society and planetary governance. The aim of this session is to encourage critical debate about the relationship between food and society and to reconfigure and advance understandings of food in the context of the political process.
Grains and Fruits: Agrarian Change and Class Relations in La Araucania, Southern Chile
Doctoral Thesis Newcastle University, 2024
This thesis sheds light on agrarian capitalism by looking at the implications over social relations when new cash crops are cultivated in a new frontier. An ethnographic work was conducted over 15 months in La Araucania Region, Southcentral Chile, where the Mapuche indigenous people have part of their ancient land. While other rural inhabitants who are not indigenous also play a role in creating a complex rural social fabric, together a definite agrarian structure arises from the interplay between these rural inhabitants and the crops grown. The research employed ethnographic methods such as shadowing, participant observation, indepth interviews, and secondary sources to reveal the perceptions farmers and peasants have toward certain crops. This research offers a nuanced sociological understanding of the processes of agrarian change underlying the adoption of cash crops. It is an effort to re-install the link between rurality and food production. In turn, the present ethnography overcomes commodity fetishism by highlighting the human agency involved in food production. The ethnography draws its arguments on the comparison of grains and fruits. While the former lies at the heart of tradition, the latter has been portrayed as one of the prime examples of agrarian capitalism due to its high dependence on wage labour. By teasing out these crops, it is possible to obtain a narrative that underlines the material, the subjective, and the cultural meaning growers endowed to either cereals or fruits in terms of security, whether in the form of food security or as a sense of security in a somewhat troubled context. It follows that the elements hindering the establishment of orchards in a new agrarian frontier are rooted in family farm dynamics Accordingly, the second main component of this research is the analysis of agrarian class relations. To this end, it pays attention to the variety of family farms coexisting within the same territory. It concludes that through the everyday interactions held by these family farms, one can improve the comprehension of family farming by identifying the common grounds and what makes each family farm unique from their neighbours
In this article, I will look at practices at the heart of the modernist project, at the coevolution of large-scale grain farmers in the Canadian prairies and their most important cash crop, canola, also called the yellow gold of the prairies. I am interested in how large-scale industrial farmers engage with the world, their ontic relationship with seeds, their direct reconnection to reality and sensorial perception of the non-human. I am looking at their 'being in touch with the warmness of things’ as Theodor Adorno would say, and how it is transformed in the industrial farming system. For Adorno, the direct intimate connection and the first hand experience not only of the warmth of things itself but of the mechanisms that destroy such warmth, is indispensable for restoring to autonomy its lived ethical substance. The co-evolution between seeds and humans leads in the direction of an increasing heteronomy of humans and seeds from the natural world when seeds become the carriers of intellectual property rights and systems of oppression and control. Industrial seeds carry an instrumental rationality and control into the field of the farmers. But how do farmers perceive them, how do they interact with these plants that carry intellectual property rights into their fields?
Rachel Carson Center Perspectives, 2012
The emergence of a professional seed industry over the course of the 20th century has been concomitant with the construction of a regime of innovation favorable to breeders and to a transformation in the nature of plants themselves. Together, these elements have led farmers engaged in industrialized forms of agriculture to outsource most of their seed-related activities. Such an organization of farming activities is now so embedded in industrialized farming systems that it has become extremely complicated for farmers--and for other actors, as well--to contest it without being accused of opposing progress and modernity. In the 2000s, however, new developments in the anti-GMO struggle and the toughening of seed laws led an alliance of French farmers organizations to go beyond protest and denunciation and to try to build alternatives to the dominant industrial seed system. The Réseau Semences Paysannes (literally the "Peasant Seed Network," RSP) was set up in 2003 as a result of this alliance. It is dependent on a network of farmers who try out alternative practices, such as reviving heirloom varieties or developing on-farm breeding. The creation of the RSP was accompanied by the establishment of a new category, semences paysannes ("peasant seeds"), whose semantic significance is examined in this essay. After recalling the sociohistorical context surrounding French agriculture and offering an overview of the legal considerations regarding seeds, I give a brief summary of this movement's emergence and examine its social and political implications. I then contextualize the movement by drawing parallels with other environmental contestation initiatives.
Introduction: Thinking About Seeds
Seeds for Diversity and Inclusion, 2022
Seed diversity is crucial to the sustainability of food and agricultural systems. Yet as Michel Pimbert’s survey of the global ‘state of seeds’ reveals, both wild and domesticated varieties are disappearing under an onslaught of human-driven pressures. Planetary crises—the sixth great extinction and climate change—constitute one. Industrialized agriculture is another: just three crops (maize, rice and wheat) currently supply over 60% of the calories humanity obtains from food. The impacts of this impoverishment on small and Indigenous farmers, ecosystems, food security and human health are manifold, and understanding them demands that we unravel a range of intermeshed social and political factors. Disparities in wealth, gender and ethnicity, for instance, determine the way seeds are cultivated, conserved, collected and exchanged. And the primary domains of seed governance—state, corporate and farm—wield different, often unequal powers. By confronting these complexities, Pimbert asse...