Tag: agriculture

Shaila Seshia Galvin discusses her book, Becoming Organic

July 3rd, 2023

Interview by Ziya Kaya

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215014/becoming-organic

Ziya Kaya: In your book, Becoming Organic, you take us to various sites of pre- and post-agricultural production activities in the Indian Himalaya where organic as a quality is getting formed. Your book meticulously makes the familiar strange by approaching organic farming as more than an observable property or commodity, a global trend, and a response to industrial farming. Could you please tell us more about the focus and the main arguments of the book? How does such an attempt to make the familiar strange in organic production bring together different bodies of literature?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: I appreciate you bringing up the idea of making the familiar strange in relation to organic. This was one of the important points of departure for me, as I embarked on this study as a doctoral student. At the time, in the US in the early 2000s, I could observe directly how organic food was becoming more prominent in certain US foodscapes – there were a growing number of farmers markets selling organic or local food, as well as dedicated sections and trademarked organic brands. I was interested too in the way that people like Michael Pollan were writing about organic farming, and drew inspiration from Julie Guthman’s study of organic agriculture in California. What stood out for me was the way that organic agriculture was often posited as a response to or antidote for industrialized modes of agricultural production, and the way that food and land under organic production were seen to be more natural. In many ways, it appeared as though organic was understood as a material property of food and land.

When you talk about making the familiar strange, I suppose what my book is doing is pushing against the way that organic is often taken to be a property of land and its produce, a property that is often marked by the absence of prohibited chemicals and fertilizers. For example, when one talks about an organic carrot, for example, or an organic seed, or in Uttarakhand, organic rice, there is often a sense that accompanies the term “organic” that it is either something that inheres in it, or that is marked by the absence of prohibited chemical inputs like fertilizers, herbicides, pesitcides, and GMOs. Instead, I am trying to show how organic is something that is actively produced and assembled, and in the book I trace how this happens by examining ethnographically the range of practices that help bring into being as a quality of land and produce; a quality that is not fixed or inherent, but that must be cajoled, negotiated, and maintained.

Ziya Kaya: You follow power discrepancies and struggles in the Indian Himalaya through the opposition between the concepts of ‘organic by default’ and ‘organic by design’. Some farmers go with the former and others with the latter due to their different historical, ecological, economic, and political conditions. However, it seems that state representatives mostly abide by the latter with the motivation to marketize farmers’ produce even when they sometimes bring the two together. I am wondering if you encountered any state employees, NGOs or so-called ‘experts’ who question, if not challenge, the standards of organic by design that also require farmers to do farming with certificates and contracts?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: That is a great question, and really insightful because it speaks exactly to the kinds of frictions and tensions around the idea of organic that I encountered during my fieldwork and that I have tried to capture in the book. For state officials and for many farmers who participated in the program, the distinction between being organic by default and organic by design was a crucial one, arguably just as crucial as the distinction between organic and conventional agricultural production. And while, on the whole, these distinctions were upheld, I did encounter some who questioned it. For example, a local NGO worker remarked to me one day that it seemed necessary to have a concrete compost pit to be considered organic; that having a compost pit was a criteria for being organic. This attuned me to the ways that physical structures such as these embodied material semiotic significance, and worked to produce particular ideas about what organic farming is and about who in a community practices it. Often, though, it was farmers themselves who were most attuned to these nuances and who, at times, questioned them. Some described to me how one of the markers of being organic for them was keeping their compost in a pit, rather than simply in a pile by the side of the field. While this might seem mundane, it’s important to underscore that a concrete compost pit does require considerable outlays of money and labour, which not all households can avail.

Ziya Kaya: Several disciplines mostly narrate farmers and their ecologies in different parts of the world through the account of clear-cut domination of the local by the global. However, the concepts that haunt me in your book are ‘uncertainty’ (p. 77) and ‘agency’ (p. 49). These concepts are significant for reminding us that farmers and nonhumans are not passive players in agriculture even though it seems that they are dominated in the ecological and economic context. I believe that they reveal how corporation-oriented and global development projects are indeed dependent on the agency or the autonomy of the farmers and their ecologies which are always relational and under construction. Do you think this kind of ethnographic focus on what you call ‘minute work’ (p. 42) of farming, instead of starting and ending up with a story of the dominant and the dominated, can challenge the actors of the large-scale industrial agriculture to revise their programs that ignore various local dynamics (history, ecology, gender, caste, and age)?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: You are right to point out the way that the book foregrounds the kind of uncertainty, ambivalence, and agency farmers in Uttarakand harbored toward the organic enterprise. Indeed, against a narrative that sees smallholder farmers as dominated by global agribusiness and contract farming, one of the most interesting aspects of my fieldwork was coming to learn how farmers navigated within, through, around, and against what can sometimes appear as a hegemonic global system. Organic producers that I met in the Doon Valley, for example, were incredibly thoughtful about their participation in the organic program. At the same time, I find it important to remember the frameworks within which smallhoders operate, frameworks that favour things like standardization, certification and that do powerfully shape situated local ecologies. In Dehradun, for example, almost all basmati rice grown in the Valley is now exported to such an extent that residents of Dehradun have great difficulty purchasing rice grown just a few miles away. Producers, on the other hand, must abide by standards for export quality basmati that have resulted in declining cultivation of local varieties and landraces of aromatic rice. Structural processes, shaped among other things through the work of state actors and wider regulatory environments, are very important. What interests me is the way that these structural dynamics and processes are maintained, enacted, reproduced through everyday practice while also attending to the ways in which they are never totalizing as people continue to work around and against them.

Ziya Kaya: As your book attests, we talk about various actors other than state officials and farmers in today’s agriculture. As I observe in my own research on digital farming in Turkey, these actors always underline the necessity of educating farmers in order to standardize agriculture. What kinds of agricultural education programs did you witness in your research on organic farming? What do you and the farmers think about these programs? Do we need or can we imagine different programs that can be an alternative to education-oriented agricultural projects?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: It’s really interesting to hear about your experience in Turkey, and the prominence of a discourse of educating farmers. This is definitely something that I observed in my research in Uttarakhand in different ways and it is definitely connected to much longer histories of agricutural extension in the region. Agricultural extension has been important for the diffusion of particular technologies; in India, the Green Revolution exemplifies this. But extension is also about the making of agrarian subjects. That is to say, agricultural extension has very much been about a model of farmer education, field schools, demonstration farmers or “show farmers” as Andrew Flachs has also written about. Education programs have often been connected to ideas of progress and improvement, in India they can also mark differences between farmers who are considered by some in scientific and policy communities to be “progressive” and those that are deemed “backward.”

Agricultural education took different forms in Uttarakhand when it came to organic agriculture. The organic commodity board organized trainings for farmers, particularly around things like composting. These trainings had mixed reception, after all the principles of composting are ones very much familiar to farmers in this region – the use of manure from ruminant animals, of their stall bedding, of crop residues. In some cases, farmers expressed how the methods in which they were trained were not appropriate to their practices of farming or their religious and cultural beliefs; in others, they asserted their own expertise over that of composting techniques introduced by the organic board. But, as you say, other actors are also present in many of today’s agrarian settings, and in the Doon Valley I also observed the role that the private rice retailer played in a kind of agricultural education. This education had a specific aim, for it was about both producing and maximizing yield but also about producing rice that would meet the export-quality standards I mentioned earlier. It was through this kind of education that the company worked to ensure that it would obtain rice not only of a certain quantity but a certain quality.

Ziya Kaya: Lastly, let me ask you a couple of questions about your method, sites, and fieldwork. How did you decide to study organic farming in the first place and where did your ethnographic research take you? Did you have any challenges and questions at the beginning of your research regarding the sites and the topic? If so, how did you deal with these kinds of questions? When I read the sentence from your book, ‘Nor was it always clear to me what it was that I was following’, I felt that it is exactly what I am going through right now in my field site and I thought some other anthropologists might have similar experiences. In what ways does the lack of a clear itinerary of a research journey contribute to our understanding of multi-sited fieldwork?

Shaila Seshia Galvin: Thank you for this question! Yes, the prospect of embarking on fieldwork, and multi-sited fieldwork, can be quite daunting. I was fortunate to have been welcomed to the organic commodity board, but it was less clear to me what rural locales I could or should work in. Given the sharp differences in Uttarakhand between agriculture located in the sub-Himalayan region of the Doon Valley, and that up in the hills, I wanted to explore connections and differences in how organic unfolded across these locales. These kinds of ideas gave a framework and sense of direction for my fieldwork, but there was still a lot of navigating to do and not a turn-by-turn itinerary that I simply followed. There were more than a few periods of being unsure about what it was I was focused on and where all of it would lead. It was actually only later that I appreciated more fully that what I was, or had, been following was the idea of organic itself. Strangely, this wasn’t apparent to me in my initial framings of the problem in my doctoral proposal, it wasn’t what I had set out to do, and it wasn’t even a strong focus of my dissertation. So, I suppose, what I have learned from this is that part of the beauty of doctoral work is that it is capacious, it contains multitudes, there is not a single story to be told or line of analysis, inquiry or theoretical framing to take. In that respect, I think that one can lean into that sense of uncertainty, it’s important to retain an openness, to allow yourself to be challenged by and responsive to all that the experience of fieldwork brings.
Kregg Hetherington discusses Government of Beans

January 11th, 2021

Interview by Indivar Jonnalagadda

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-government-of-beans

Indivar Jonnalagadda: What inspired the book’s central idea of ‘agribiopolitics’, which encompasses the government of the health and welfare of both people and plants? In contrast to the 20th century theorists of biopolitics, what makes the question of nonhuman life unavoidable for contemporary anthropology?

Kregg Hetherington: If we think of the major investments in crop improvement that started in the late 19th century and later gave rise to the Green Revolution, then we can spot major shifts in how the relationship between human health and plant health have been conceptualized. These histories alongside the contemporary activism around people’s health around monocrops led to the idea of agribiopolitics.

In the late 19^thand early 20^th century, there was a vitalist tradition, where community health was being analogized to that of plants in often racial or eugenic terms. These terms also easily stretched to talking about the health of the nation. Reading that vitalist literature, I found, resonated with the present in a way that reading Foucault and others in the mid-20^th century period, for example, did not. I think the mid-20^th century thinkers were writing amidst the ascendancy of a liberal notion of development that focuses on human welfare primarily through economics. Thus, the notion that making better plants makes your population healthier, gets supplanted by the notion that making better plants makes your population healthier by making them less poor. However, after the success of the Green Revolution and these massive expansions of chemically-intensive monocrops, there are counter-movements which are saying that maybe there’s an inverse relationship between the health of plants and the health of people and other living things in the area. This brings the relationship between plant, human, and other life to the fore. It is a particularly weird problem in places like Paraguay where the economy is now completely invested in the well-being of a particular plant, with mixed effects on different populations.

Indivar Jonnalagadda: You argue that specific crops historically become linked with specific nationalities, languages, and ethnicities, as companion species. Could you briefly synthesize for us the relationship between language ideology and agribiopolitics in Paraguay?

Kregg Hetherington: There’s a long-term discourse in Latin America about the relationship between certain groups of indigenous people and plants. The phrase “people of the corn” is something that one has heard about for a long time. It struck me that there was something similar going on in Paraguay. For example, the idea that people are made of cassava (the main starch that rural folks eat in Paraguay) is the source of lots of joking and ways of talking. Yet, what really interested me was soybeans. When soybeans, as this incredibly aggressive monocrop, enter into Paraguay, they do so almost exclusively with Brazilian migrants as the people planting them. They immediately get associated with a fear of a larger nation next door, a fear of the takeover of Paraguayan land and sovereignty, a fear of Portuguese (a European language) supplanting Guarani (an indigenous language).

If the beans are Brazilian, as people would say directly, then what’s Paraguayan? People aren’t worried about their cassava, they’re also not worried about their corn. Instead, what they were worried about was cotton. The fact that cotton was the crop with which people identified in this sort of sovereignty-project was very interesting, because cotton was itself only introduced in the 1960s as a Green Revolution crop. The set of identifications between rural Guarani-speaking Paraguayans and cotton that had been developed by French engineers in the 60s turned the story in unexpected ways. It also forced me into a more uncomfortable kind of historical analytical space, where I had to contend with the fact that cotton itself was a settler colonial crop that had been brought into this area merely two generations ago.

Indivar Jonnalagadda: Comparing Government of Beans with your previous book Guerrilla Auditors, you very generatively shift your attention from bureaucracy to regulation more generally. Could you say a little bit about the analytic usefulness of this move?

Kregg Hetherington: I think it happened fairly organically, because in the first book I was dealing with property, and for the second book in dealing with beans I had to think about the state differently. Property, particularly in Paraguay, really is a bureaucratic construct. The cadastre in Paraguay was created in 1876 by bureaucrats calling a bunch of elites to the capital to write down what they owned. Every transaction having to do with official property transactions in Paraguay since then, makes some iterative reference to this originary document. The whole thing was very apt for a kind of post-structuralist analysis of the way that bureaucratic practices call relations into being discursively, and I was also attentive to the materiality of the documents. But the activists among whom I conducted ethnography back then kept telling me that the documents are one thing, the bigger problem is the beans. Though the beans never really entered into that story, because they didn’t fit that kind of framework. I think that’s where regulation comes in.

This is too ideal-typical, but bear with me; regulation is the moment where the state is no longer focused on itself and it is (in the Karen Barad sense) meeting the universe halfway. It’s responding to something outside of itself and it’s using whatever tools it has at hand to try to shift or change material relations. So while I’d figured out a way to talk about bureaucracy and the movement of property documents in a way that had a very nice internal structure, beans troubled that internal structure. As it turned out, that was exactly what the bureaucrats felt about the beans too. Thus, the regulatory project is a much more open sort of responsive project where they’re just trying things, knowing that the agency of the state is incredibly limited in places.

Indivar Jonnalagadda: With regards to regulation, you also offer a fundamentally communicative framework with your concept of regulatory pragmatics. Can you say a little more about it and why you foreground the “progressive unfolding” of responses between various actors?

Kregg Hetherington: Regulatory pragmatics is a way of shifting between the linguistic-pragmatic mode and what I saw as an approach to response and responsiveness in some of the STS literature. Donna Haraway, particularly, thinks about the nonhuman as something that’s capable of responding, and Karen Barad similarly talks about intra-actions. These ideas are famously philosophically difficult for certain people who are too focused on language. But I found them really useful for thinking about what regulation was doing. There’s this obvious thing that happens in any legal anthropology: you realize that anyone who’s working in a legal sphere is always dealing with the gap between the rule and the thing, or between the representation and the ground. The example that I go into some length in the book is, how do you decide if something is a “neighborhood road”? If it is a neighborhood road, then the regulations further stipulates that there should be a plant barrier against pesticide drift from fields. The amount of time that people spent arguing over whether something was a neighborhood road or not, suggested that this was a field of play that was really important. I didn’t want to stop at the gap and suggest that there’s all kinds of stuff that can happen. Instead, I wanted to say, every time people encounter the gap, things shift. That’s the place where sovereignty occurs, because judgment gets involved. So the interaction between government and farmers occurs through the choice of plant used to create the barrier between the crop and the neighbourhood road. I use these mundane examples around the species of plants used as barriers just to force a certain kind of humility about what it is that regulation can do and what a state can do.

Also, who is communicating in these cases? There are a number of actors that one can point to that are obviously communicating back and forth. But there are all these other actors that crop up, like snakes, or the bandits who hide in the elephant grass and jump out and steal people’s motorcycles. There are all kinds of ways in which humans and nonhumans end up responding to a certain kind of regulatory entreaty with their own kind of response that then forces the regulators to go back to the drawing board.

Indivar Jonnalagadda: You describe how people often respond to your presentations on soy by wondering if eating tofu is unethical; a moment of doubt about the ethics of their eating habits that you call “Tofu moments”. You see these moments as being alive with experimental possibility for an ethics of eating well. Can you describe a significant Tofu moment of your own?

Kregg Hetherington: Ethics was not what I set out to try to theorize, but it was always part of the experience of the whole thing. The tofu moments—that still occur when I present this work about soybeans and about how destructive soybeans are—were when people in the audience who are vegetarian, suddenly get worried about the tofu. Given that the soy beans are being pre-dominantly produced in order to feed animals for meat, vegetarianism is a pretty reasonable response to the horror of soybeans. Nonetheless, there’s something great about that moment where someone starts to wonder if the decision they’ve made, is actually ethically far more complicated than they thought. That’s what I want the book to do — to encourage an opening. The moment that one feels kind of stable in a certain way of responding to a situation, is precisely the moment when you want to reach out a little bit farther.

A tofu moment for me was a specific story about fieldwork that I also describe in the book. As a white, North American, middle class person going and doing this kind of research, in places that have been historically exploited by the very kinds of financial comforts that I benefit from all the time, there’s always this question about the ethics of what research is all about. Questions about the extent to which it is extractivist or benefits from other forms of extraction on which it depends. There was one specific moment during the research, where I was hanging out with very close friends of mine, who were also my research assistants in the field. We had retreated to this posh country cottage that friends of theirs owned to reflect on the research. At a certain point during that reflection, we were approached by a police cruiser that was going around the neighborhood, and were asked to pay a bribe. This is not that uncommon a situation in Paraguay, but it’s always a little bit unclear what exactly one is paying the bribe for. But it occurred to me at that moment that we are being asked to bribe the police to secure the conditions within which this research becomes possible. This was a moment that opened up that whole set of research dynamics for me. As I think about what future research might look like in Paraguay post-COVID, I’m still troubled on the one hand by ethical commitments that I feel like I’ve made to people, and on the other hand by the difficulty of new forms of awareness of how much my own practice relies on international extractivist structures.

CaMP Anthropology

Communication, Media and Performance

Tag: agriculture

Shaila Seshia Galvin discusses her book, Becoming Organic

Kregg Hetherington discusses Government of Beans