Infrastructuring ‘Red Gold’: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s Raspberry Country

Abstract

ABSTRACT Serbia has exported raspberries since socialism. Its production network withstood the post-Yugoslav property transformations and grew despite global competition. This article traces the configuration of the ‘infrastructures of value’ that underwrite the raspberries’ spatio-temporal reach to distant markets. Combining new and historical materialism, it contributes to economic anthropology by studying the interplay between two infrastructures – agronomics and the ‘cold chain’ – and their differential weathering of historical transformations. During socialism, the agronomists ‘infrastructured’ the environment in collaboration with farmers and plants, while the containment technologists upgraded the freezing infrastructure, solidifying the fruits into graded, storable, and transportable commodities. After socialism, private entrepreneurs replicated the cold-chain modules, while agronomic research and quality control became de-institutionalised. As the agronomic infrastructure stagnated, the cold chain went into overdrive. In this late-capitalist ‘infrastructural involution’, political-economic transformations reshaped multispecies infrastructures, devaluing the contributions of plants and rural labour while benefiting entrepreneurs and wholesalers.