The Factish in the Field

Abstract

Research in GM crops is of pressing importance to biotechnologists, development economists, government officials, and concerned citizens. Each of these stakeholders carries preconceived notions of success and failure that not only influence how data regarding GM crops is shared but also reify the objective reality of GM seeds as a technology that might exist outside the idiosyncracies of a farmer’s field. In this essay, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among GM cotton planting farmers in Telangana, India to deconstruct the process by which scientific facts are created, leveraged, and then divorced from their subjective contexts in agricultural research. In paying closer attention to the ways that the science of agricultural development has limited possibilities of farmer experience and transformed GM seeds into autonomous beings, this paper attempts to take up Latour’s call for a compositionist investigation of a common world slowly assembled by its constituent actors.

Introduction to Special Collection: Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: The Co-Production of Plant–People Lifeworlds

“…Through this relationship and encounter, Despret calls attention to the ways that Hans provides a device to bridge thought, action, consciousness, and will. Far outside any kind of objective, anthropocentric experimental space where animal cognition could be understood as a “factish” existing apart from human conditions (Flachs 2019 b ; Latour 2010), horses and humans influence one another's thoughts and actions. Despret describes and deconstructs several such experiments with people, horses, monkeys, dogs, and rats to argue that the artificial objectivity of scientific observation is undermined by a deeper truth: species become quickly attuned to one another in ways and create and transform all involved.…”

Who Knows What a Microbe is?

“…Others are patchy, uneven, loosely woven with holes, invisibilities, and inconsistencies; they are "slippery" as are, for example, enactments of wild and farmed salmon (Lien and Law, 2011). Because things are assembled and these assemblages are textured like fabrics, perspective matters; the location in the fabric matters; 'the same thing' may not be the same thing to everyone, everywhere, everywhen, and therefore what we know about microbes is always factish, or provisional (Latour, 2012;Flachs, 2019). A microbe on a product label might be a taxonomic genus or a quantity of spores, whereas in a lab that 'same microbe' may be a phenotype under a microscope or petri dish, and in a field, in that 'same microbe' might appear through other cues such as plants with healthy roots.…”

Bt cotton, pink bollworm, and the political economy of sociobiological obsolescence: insights from Telangana, India

“…Exaggeration, underestimation, and misremembering facts are common challenges in social sciences research. However, since we did not ask for specific agronomic figures such as yield, prices or income, which farmers often have difficulties supplying (Flachs 2019b), this approach allowed us to record larger trends in Bt cotton production from the farmers' perspective. With this study, we therefore do not aim to and cannot portray aggregate production statistics or yield averages; rather, we attempt to expose the effects of Bt cotton technology on marginalised farming HHs by depicting the mechanisms of dispossession on a micro scale.…”