Entanglements of Reciprocal Relations

Abstract

We borrow our title from James Verinis’ review, this issue, of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's book, The Mushroom at the End of the World. This collection of articles highlights relationship (as idea and as lived reality) from different perspectives and in transition. One set of contributions invites us to explore emergent ideas about the concept of relationship as an organizing principle for the natural world, humans included. These pieces provide us with historical perspective on changing paradigms in science, research, culture, and politics, and ask us to imagine the world—and act in it—in ways that go beyond binary, mechanistic, and hierarchical modes of thought, focusing instead on relations of co-creation across species, things, and ideas. Another set of articles carefully traces the multi-scale webs of relationship that condition food security and production, cross-generational and border transitions, and species conservation. They, too, challenge the reader to understand problems often posed in binary oppositions (e.g., socioeconomic isolation vs. integration, production vs. conservation) through new formulations. In “From ‘Genetic Resources’ to ‘Ecosystems Services’: A Century of Science and Global Policies for Crop Diversity Conservation,” Marianna Fenzi and Christophe Bonneuil provide a history of changing ideas about crop biodiversity over the past century. They detail shifts from purely ‘resourcist’ views, “emphasizing crop genes as resources for economic exploitation,” to more relational and biocultural concepts “emphasizing ‘crop biodiversity’” as both product and goal of human-nature interactions. Highlighting the implications for industrial vs. smallholder agriculture, they provide important context for the emergence of farmer-centered research, and anthropology's key role in it, as highlighted in CAFE's special issue on the topic (2014: v36 issue 1) and by Price and Palis, this issue. Nicholas C. Kawa's contribution, “How Religion, Race, and the Weedy Agency of Plants Shape Amazonian Home Gardens” offers two intertwined theses: one, about the ways in which plants become associated with the histories of racialization and marginalization of particular human groups; the other, about how the “weedy agency” of plants complicates and defies these histories to shape the biocultural landscape in their own ways. Kawa's piece provides both method and insights for the challenges of analyzing the world in more relational and multi-species terms. Jean Gilruth-Rivera takes us on a historical journey on the vias of Mexico in “A Semi-Autonomous Mexican Peasant Community and Globalization: The Role of the Cacique (Broker) in Maintaining Traditional Agroecology.” She explores the relationships between traditional agroecological practices and isolation from global trade in Malinalco, in central Mexico. While the community's inaccessibility is often attributed to rough topography, in reality, it was a Cacique's opposition to roads that helped maintain traditional practices among peasants. In “Borders Out of Register: Edge Effects in the U.S.–Mexico Foodshed,” authors Laurel Bellante and Gary Paul Nabhan examine the effects of the geopolitical border on food safety and food waste. The concept of the foodshed, while useful, becomes complicated when it is bisected by the U.S.–Mexico border. The authors explore how border effects simultaneously create vulnerabilities, for example, when perceptions of Mexican produce cause heightened food safety scrutiny, as well as opportunities, such as salvaging food waste for emergency food aid, in the food system. In our final research article, Jessie K. Fly examines food security at the household level in “Shrimp Aquaculture, Social Capital, and Food Security in Rural Vietnam.” Market-based economic reforms have caused intensification of shrimp farming and contributed to out-migration of younger village members. Fly shows how this reduces elderly residents’ dietary diversity, and how social capital, long a strategy to ensure food security, has become unreliable. The article poignantly shows how agricultural modernization efforts often result in reduced food resources for those communities most intimately engaged in food production. In our research report section, Lisa Leimar Price and Florencia G. Palis document a little-known history of the critical role of anthropologists in creating spaces for agroecological and biocultural perspectives within the dominant science and research paradigms described elsewhere in this issue by Fenzi and Bonneuil. “Bringing Farmer Knowledge and Learning into Agricultural Research: How Agricultural Anthropologists Transformed Strategic Research at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)” shows how researchers engaged with major institutions to introduce methodological and conceptual innovations giving a key role to local human-nature interactions. Finally, in a combination of book review and philosophical essay, James P. Verinis conveys the challenging and innovative facets of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Weaving insights from anthropology, other reviews, wider intellectual trends, and his own ruminations, Verinis finds Tsing's work compelling in its encouragement to “transcend the confines of modern scientific thinking about ‘ourselves’ and ‘others’,” and in its novel take on nature as collaboration in both unexpected and obvious ways.