From Organism to Commodity: Gender, Class, and the Development of Soil Science in Hungary 1900–89

Abstract

Through a succession of liberal and state-socialist regimes in Hungary, the interconnections of gender, class, and soil management established much of the social framework within which soil scientists produced constructs that affected scientific explanations of and prescriptions to soil-degradation problems. Various metaphors, analogies, conflations, and externalisations shaped notions of soil productivity, the producing subject, and the nature of soils. Their legitimacy and justification emerged from the evolving interplay of rural processes, the economic policies of succeeding regimes, and capitalist world-system dynamics. The results of the study suggest that physical scientists have actively promoted regime ideologies, that gendered scientific constructs need not be grounded in dualistic syllogisms, and that industrialised state-socialist scientific practices largely conformed to bourgeois principles.