Journals at the University of Arizona
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Producing value from Australia's vineyards: an ethnographic approach to 'the quality turn' in the Australian wine industry
No full textAbstract This article provides a detailed ethnographic intervention to the phenomenon of value-added agriculture, a discourse that has attained several concrete forms in Australian wine industry policy, and which is routinely presented as a legitimate rural future in wider agricultural and social science research. The legal and policy architecture of 'Geographical Indications' purports to value the regional distinctiveness of agricultural areas, by creating legally-defined wine regions. Producers from these wine regions enjoy privileged access to the use of regional descriptors that apply to their products, and the constitution of such wine regions can also codify the relationships between this regional identity and concrete viticultural and winemaking practices. This article draws on ethnographic research within the Clare Valley region of South Australia, one of the first Australian wine regions to be formally constituted as a legal entity, to examine in close detail the relationships that this region's wine producers have with their own discrete areas of operation. These ethnographic illustrations highlight that the creation of economic value within the premium wine industry cannot be reduced to the technical aspects of viticulture and oenology, nor the legal and policy means by which relationships between products and land are codified. Rather, the nuanced social understandings of landscape that wine producers are consistently developing is a critical element of cultural and commercial infrastructure that affords any wine producer or grape grower the possibility of achieving monopolistic relationships over discrete vineyard areas and the wine that is produced from them. These social understandings have a specifically egalitarian character that acts as a hedge against the chronic uncertainties arising from the global economic environment in which premium wine industry is inescapably a part. This resistance to codification, I argue, is a productive space that constitutes a form of resilience against chronically unstable sets of commercial and environmental conditions. Keywords: monopoly, regional rents, occupational discourse, intellectual property, Geographic Indications, Australian agrarian future
Resisting ruination: resource sovereignties and socioecological struggles in Cotopaxi, Ecuador
No full textAbstract This paper examines coordinated community responses to the deployment of controversial technologies by broccoli plantations in Cotopaxi province in Ecuador's central highlands. It studies the influence of enduring structures of inequality that delimit the distribution of land and water in the region – the effects of what Ann Stoler calls imperial debris within ongoing processes of ruination. It considers the socioecological struggles mobilized to address these processes in terms of resource sovereignties – shifting assemblages of rights and relations between land, identity, ecology and social justice. The technologies in question – acetylene 'cannons' designed to disperse clouds and thus prevent damage to crops from hailstones – were locally disruptive to weather patterns, agriculture, and everyday life. In collaboration with the regional offices of Ecuador's national Indigenous Movement, affected communities from across the region campaigned – in the streets and in the courts, and ultimately with some success – to outlaw these technologies of appropriation. Although the initial case was settled in 2010, new suspicions emerged in early 2016 as some community members again blamed the plantations for an unseasonable drought, alleging they had found new technologies to use in the destruction of clouds. Reading the cannons as forms of rubble (Gordillo 2014) focuses our attention on how and why these abandoned technologies re-emerged as a source of conflict in the region and exerted unexpected influence on responses to drought conditions. I suggest these claims, counterclaims and subsequent struggles not only reveal the persistence of processes of ruination and of resistance to them but also expose the fragility within apparently immutable political systems and destructive landscapes. Key words: environment, Ecuador, technology, ruination, rubble, wate
The political ecology of human-elephant relations: comparing local perceptions of elephants around Chyulu Hills and Mount Kasigau in southern Kenya
No full textAbstract Although African elephants have a global appeal and donors especially in the global North significantly support their protection, rural African's attitudes towards elephant conservation are complex, and discouraging in certain locations. A proper understanding of the attitudes of people living around protected areas towards elephants is important for designing successful elephant conservation programs. Using a political ecology framework, this study assessed attitudes towards elephant among two communities living near protected areas in the Tsavo region of Kenya; the Kamba who live around Chyulu Hills National Park and the Kasigau Taita who live around Mt. Kasigau Forest, Kenya. I conducted in depth interviews with local residents, to examine the link between local attitudes towards elephants with the political-ecological history of extra-local effects especially the establishment and management of protected areas. The results show that residents around Mt. Kasigau had more favorable attitudes towards elephants than those around the Chyulu Hills National Park. This article concludes that local perceptions about elephants in the Tsavo region are political, they are embedded in issues of rights to livelihood, and access to and control over lands and resources. I argue that local meanings and concerns about elephants need to be integrated in the management plans of protected areas. Key Words: elephants, Chyulu Hills, Mount Kasigau, conservation, political ecology, protected area
Expo 2015 in Milan: the power of the Machine
No full textAbstract This article describes and analyzes the Expo 2015 in Milan, building on the work of Alf Hornborg on the 'Machine' to discusses material and ideological processes of this mega-project. Hornborg calls attention to the social inequalities enabling the employment of technology in production (not only in the capitalist worldeconomy) and to its cultural underpinnings, among them money fetishism. With mega-events, the geoculture of the capitalist world-economy extols 'growth' and 'development' and celebrates the interstate system, legitimating public expenditures with a media-hyped importance of the event. The cultural force of megaevents obtains social acceptance of the unequal exchanges at their material core. Under Expo 2015's slogan "Feeding the planet, energy for life", agricultural land was destroyed to build a cement platform the size of a small city in a space of unbounded capitalism where labor laws were suspended and fiscal advantages were granted to firms. The Italian state paid for the basic infrastructure, while foreign states (and the corporations present) provided for their own pavilions. Ideologically, Expo 2015 celebrated the capacity of states and the transnational companies to 'technological advances.' Technology was presented as an autonomous force in history, propagating a vision of humanity acting on nature through a 'purified' technology independent of social relations of production. The 'Milan Charter', the Expo's cultural legacy, produced and reproduced the hegemonic geoculture which presents technology as the solution to social problems. Keywords: Expo 2015, mega-events, the Machine, human ecology, Alf Hornbor
Trickster carbon: stories, science, and postcolonial interventions for climate justice
No full textAbstract This article proposes the idea of the trickster figure as a way to account for the shifting material, and cultural properties of carbon in the cultural politics of climate change. Combining scientific understandings of allotropy in chemistry – describing the property of certain elements to manifest in various highly diverse forms – and the insights of Caribbean trickster stories, trickster carbon enables novel understandings of the multiple workings and effects of carbon as a material and cultural element. Rather than granting 'carbon' a singular seemingly-scientific meaning or reducing carbon to a singular problem that master human agents can ever definitively trap or sequester, this notion allows us to view carbon's unique ability to shape-shift in a variety of contexts and for myriad agendas. Understanding carbon in this way provides more than simply a theoretical or imaginative 'romp'; rather, this lens enables both a critique of the ways in which carbon is mobilized in practice as a profit-generating tool of colonial capture and also a generative opening for understanding carbon's potential as a connector to more transformative associations and postcolonial politics. As an ambivalent and paradoxical figure, trickster carbon offers a powerful method of cultural way-finding through the urgent concern of climate change. Key words: Trickster; postcolonial; decolonial; STS; stories; cultural politics of climate change; carbo
Conflictos socio-ambientales en la sociedad moderna: aportes de la ecología política Latinoamericana y la teoría de la acción comunicativa
No full textModern society's socio-environmental conflicts result from multiple causes, and responding to them is a complex, multidisciplinary venture. This article contributes to the understanding of that complexity, with a discussion of the main analytical keys that political ecology has used for the study of socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America. The article shows the important role that communication takes in this process, and argues that the Theory of Communicative Action can contribute to the political ecological analysis of socio-environmental conflicts in modern society, and can identify paths that allow the establishment of new alternative projects.Palabras clave: Socio-environmental conflicts, political ecology, Latin America, communicative action, modern society, alternative projects
