Plants, Politics, and the Imagination over the Past 500 Years in the Indo-Malay Region

Abstract

This is an analysis of the way that the colonial-era model of plantation production in Southeast Asia disciplined plants and people and, of most importance, the way that production relations between plants and people were conceived. This discipline was challenged during historic moments of crisis that stimulated the imagination of alternative modes of production. The analysis will focus on the histories of three plants in particular: black pepper (Piper nigrum), Para rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), and a sword grass (Imperata cylindrica). Notable events in their histories include the proscription of pepper cultivation in the sixteenth century Hikayat Banjar in southeastern Borneo; the tribal dream of rice-eating rubber in the 1930s in western Borneo and the contemporaneous international effort to restrict smallholder rubber cultivation; and the lengthy history of productive native management of Imperata and disbelief in such management by plantation managers and government officials. Each case represents conflict between alternative and competing systems of crop management, which consists in part in transcendent exercises to imagine, or deny, alternative systems of production. These leaps of the imagination are nourished by a focus on the human-nonhuman divide, especially during historic moments of crisis. There are many persons in cultured communities who see nothing harmful about destruction of forest in shifting cultivation. (Bartlett 1956:709) Industrial rubber. .. is made possible by the savagery of European conquest, the competitive passions of colonial botany, the resistance strategies of peasants. .. and much more that would not be evident from a teleology of industrial progress.

The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

“…The contributors to the special issue model the methodological intervention of the patch with admirable ethnographic texture (see also Brown 2019; Viveiros de Castro 2019; Dove 2019; Ficek 2019; Hadfield and Haraway 2019; Keck 2019; Khan 2019; Morita and Suzuki 2019; Perfecto, Jiménez‐Soto, and Vandermeer 2019; Tsai 2019). These perspectives detail, for example, Alaskan salmon population biology as a genre of claims making in which damage to nonhuman ecosystems establishes the grounds of repair for the ongoing violence of settler colonialism (Swanson 2019), landfills in Kampala as sites of subsistence livelihoods for informal waste collectors and marabou storks afflicted by common regimes of displacement and disposability (Doherty 2019), and productive entanglements between human and nonhuman species in the farming landscapes of Yilan, Taiwan, as the foundation of a politics that extends outside the market values of industrial agribusiness (Tsai 2019).…”

Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology

“…Ficek argues that such unexpected effects of cattle complicate conventional accounts of cattle as creatures who by their nature are always complicit in colonization and dispossession. Like Dove's (2019) warning against a facile demonization of oil palm trees (Elaeis guineensis) or Imperata grass, Ficek's account shows that bovines are more than methane-belching colonial creatures and that livestock proliferation works to produce patchy landscapes of riotous ferality as well as simplification. From the feral and unexpected encounters between bovines and humans in Panama, as from those between marabou storks and salvagers in Uganda, the illegitimate hope of a kind of co-species collaboration in ruins emerges for which we do not have a language.…”

“…Patches show us histories of genocide, displacement, exploitation, and oppression-together with the ecological consequences of these programs. All the papers in this special issue address human inequalities: cattle push forward Anthropocene colonization, with its genocidal practices (Ficek 2019); smallholders' perspectives on plant life are systematically erased in Southeast Asia (Dove 2019); Ugandan garbage pickers work alongside birds to find their livelihoods in the ruins (Doherty 2019). Several papers address how scholars might get enough distance from still-hegemonic frameworks of progress, modernization, and growth to avoid their unjust exclusions.…”

Possibilities for Multispecies Approaches in Coffee Landscapes

“…For Guthman, the coconstitution includes elements of political economy, scientific knowledge, migrants and labor, pathogens and chemicals, and other humans and more-thanhumans that together play a role in the fragility of the strawberry industry. Dove (2019) outlines how the introduction of black pepper, tea, and sword grass into agrarian co-constitutions expanded small holders' imaginations and cultivation strategies, often at odds with settler-colonial production regimes. Kumpf (2020) demonstrates how the lack of compensation for tea workers results in them ignoring tea tasting during production, which leads to lower quality tea.…”

“…Like Guthman's (2019) analysis with strawberries, the coffee industry results from the coconstitutions between political, social, economic, and biological elements. Dove's (2019) studies with pepper highlights the role of cash crops with colonial histories of displacement and local innovation, as also seen with coffee. Kumpf's (2020) investigation with tea sheds light on how coffee ecologies connect to labor and production regimes that influence multispecies co-constitutions that affect coffee quality and taste.…”