Phytophthora infestans is the basic ingredient for an outbreak of potato late blight, introduced unintentionally into Europe in the 1840s by a steamship carrying fresh seed potatoes from the Americas. Hailed as a population savior, the potato grew into a main staple food in Europe in the following centuries. However, overdependence on potatoes as a subsistence crop created a highly fragile environment in which P. infestans eventually proliferated together with an artificial monoculture regime. In this essay, we follow P. infestans through the history of transatlantic connections. We disentangle three phases of transatlantic exchange through which the Solanum tuberosumwith the fungus-like water mold in its wake-originally departed from the Andes to Europe and most recently announced its comeback. First, we zoom in on an intensified phase of transatlantic exchange that led up to the European potato famine of the 1840s. The import and development of a potato monoculture was intended to sustain a numerous and rapidly growing rural population, albeit with disastrous consequences, as we illustrate with the case of Flanders, where the potato disease made its first entrance in 1845. Second, we contrast the rapid spread of P. infestans across the potato-producing European countryside with its centuries-long containment in the Andes. Third, we unravel the continuing and precarious transatlantic connection between Andean peasants and globalized markets through potato biotechnology. In each phase, multispecies-human and nonhuman-global encounters are identified as driving forces. This allows us to construct an alternative history of the potato and its crucial role in the making of the modern world.
Across remote Aboriginal Australia, phone and tablet photographic technologies are giving rise to vibrant new forms of visual culture. Greenscreen software, montage and .gif effects enable the creation of layered images that literally pulse with meaning and affect. Akin to bark painting-yet deliberately different-such images reveal the spectral depth of Yolngu worlds. At a time when families across Arnhem Land face relentless loss and social stress, the making, sharing and viewing of elaborated family photographs reaffirm, reconstitute, and thicken a world of vitality, resonance and ancestral significance. Through deliberately posed and often highly postproduced photography Yolngu can creatively participate in a profoundly synaesthetic and sentient world, a world enlivened by uncanny encounter, a world that requires the ongoing affirmation and renewal of relationships through imagistic practice. This is a world of sensuous force and inside meanings, a world that far exceeds the registers of what the eye can see, the camera can capture, or, indeed, what the anthropologist will ever know.
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