Land als Ressource, Boden und Landschaft: Materialität, Relationalität und neue Agrarfragen in der Politischen Ökologie

Abstract

Kurzfassung. The Anthropocene reorients the agrarian question as an ecological question of planetary scale. Rather than resolving the inherent tension between political economy and the biophysical environment by moving political ecology closer to the natural sciences, we propose an active engagement with impulses from the environmental humanities and anthropological engagements with alternative ontologies. The relational political ecology of agriculture that we outline in this article draws on feminist science studies, multispecies ethnography, new materialism and critical geography. We show the relevance of a relational approach to agriculture as a natureculture entanglement by reviewing three conceptualisations of land in political ecology in relation to our anthropological research in South India (Münster) and geographical research in Northern Pakistan (Poerting). Notions of land as resource, land as soil and land as landscape respectively exemplify shifts in theoretical and political engagements with agriculture in the Anthropocene. A relational political ecology of agriculture incorporates these theoretical sensibilities and brings them in conversation with ontological politics of agro-ecological movements who respond to the variegated crises of the anthropocene. We suggest a perspective on agrarian landscape assemblages as coproduced by histories of capitalist transformations and the (affective) relations between humans, other species and materials.

Introduction to symposium ‘Reimagining land: materiality, affect and the uneven trajectories of land transformation’

“…Finally, land has life-giving capacities (Li 2018; Münster and Poerting 2016), it enables growing, gathering, and hunting for food, pumping up water, and building a house to live in. 8 In short, human survival is unimaginable without land (Münster and Poerting 2016), just as land would remain un-imagined without humans. Due to the above-mentioned features of (high degrees of) fixity, a reservoir of manifold resources, its capacity to constitute a renewable resource, and above all its life-giving capacities, land tends to have a high symbolic value in societies across space and time.…”

The value of the homeland: Land in Duhok, Kurdistan‐Iraq, as territory, resource, and landscape

“…The dissatisfaction interlocutors expressed with Kurdistan's failed economic policies and incomplete and unsatisfactory transformation of land into resource points us to a third perspective on land, which I refer to here as “land as landscape.” Although landscapes can in themselves be commodified and turned into resources (Muenster and Poerting 2016, 252–53), the lens of landscape makes land visible not primarily as a detached (if place‐bound) economic resource but rather as a site of “dwelling” (Ingold 1993, 2012)—an ensemble of material, social, and cultural relationships, stretching through space and time (Hirsch and O'Hanlon 1995; Janowski and Ingold 2012; Luig and von Oppen 1997; Stewart and Strathern 2003). Landscapes can be read as palimpsests on which historically changing social and political formations are superimposed.…”

“…Material and symbolic, pragmatic, and normative dimensions intersect in practical attributions and estimations of land value, and as Li (2014) points out in her engagement with the ways in which land is assembled into a resource, considerable work is needed to reduce this plethora of meanings to render land manageable. The multiplicity of affordances, meanings, properties, and qualities inherent to the broad category of "land" can fruitfully be unpacked through the simultaneous application of multiple analytical lenses, as Muenster and Poerting (2016) have shown with their consideration of land as soil, resource, and landscape.…”

Wie heilig sind Wald und Wasser? Die Rolle von Landschaftskonzepten im Disput um Tourismusentwicklung in einem Naturschutzgebiet in Nordbali, Indonesien

“…Hervorheben möchte ich dabei Biersack (2006), Bryant (2001), Bryant/Bailey (1997), Foster/Magdoff (2012), Münster et al (eds.) (2012), Münster/Münster (2012a, b), Münster et al (2015), Münster/Poerting (2016). Die Forschung letzterer Autor*innen fand in Indien statt, die theoretische Herangehensweise und Grundlagen inspirierten jedoch weite Teile der Verschriftlichung meiner eigenen Fallstudie.…”