scholarly journals Thinking with the grain

2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062110048
Author(s):  
Gavin Bridge
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Granular Systems ◽  
Granular System ◽  
Commodity Chains ◽  
Global Commodity Chains ◽  
Short Commentary

In this short commentary, I consider William Jamieson’s proposal ‘For Granular Geography’. I focus on two parallel arguments at work in his piece: the proposal for a political ecology of sand foregrounding the physical dynamics of sand as a granular system; and second, his programmatic agenda for human geography in which the instability and unpredictability of granular systems become a ‘conceptual grammar’ for the material geographies of value transformation. I am sympathetic to thinking through materials and alive to the poetic possibilities of sand, but ultimately find neither of Jamieson’s arguments persuasive. I suggest a fuller engagement with existing ‘grammars’ – including those of new materialism, elemental geographies, and the role of friction in global commodity chains – could help clarify the contribution that ‘granularity’ might be able to make.

Communism, Cold War and Commodity Chains: Southeast Asian Labor History in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 159-179
Author(s):  
Ulbe Bosma
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Commodity Chains ◽  
Global Commodity Chains ◽  
Advanced Economies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The geographical term “Southeast Asia” dates from the 1930s, and came to denote a topic for academic studies in the early days of the Cold War. As such, it includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indochina, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Southeast Asia has become thoroughly incorporated in the global economy over the past 150 years; first, as a producer of commodities, and later, as a supplier of cheap garments and electronic components. Under Dutch colonialism and British hegemony—the latter established by the conquest of Burma and the imposition of free trade on Siam and the Philippines in the 1850s—Southeast Asia was turned into a key provider of commodities for the industrializing countries. During high colonialism, from 1870 to 1930, the region became increasingly intertwined, via Singapore as the central port and through the role of mainland Southeast Asia as the rice basket for the plantations of maritime Southeast Asia. After the Second World War, the region was the world's most violent frontier of containment for communist expansion. In recent decades, Southeast Asia has become integrated in global commodity chains as a producer of cheap industrial goods, often as a subcontractor for more advanced economies, such as those of Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and later on, Southeast China.

scholarly journals Land grabs reexamined: Gulf Arab agro-commodity chains and spaces of extraction

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2095665
Author(s):  
Christian Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Commodity Chains ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Gulf States ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Labour Time ◽  
Gulf Arab

Research on land grabs has identified the Gulf Arab states as major actors in the acquisition of agricultural land. However the role of these investments in the economies of the Gulf remains underexplored in the scholarly literature. In response, I propose that these projects are part of commodity chains that are articulated to the agribusiness industry in the Gulf states. I argue that they are extractive zones; enclaves created through articulation to the investor states, and disarticulation from their host society. With this considered, the commodity chains that link these projects with the Gulf economies transfer surplus value in the form of labour time, but also biophysical matter such as water, energy, and soil nutrients. This focus on the appropriation of nature allows a better understanding of these schemes and their role in the Gulf’s economic growth. As will be demonstrated, the cycle of exhaustion of water impells the location of these land grabs, and this context connects them with the history of domestic projects. This article uses a framework that integrates theory on the spatial contestations of commodity chains with work on political ecology, and by doing so it contributes to a growing body of work that examines the relationship between networks of commodity production and nature.

scholarly journals History, Colonialism, and Archival Methods in Socio-Hydrological Scholarship: A Case Study of the Boerasirie Conservancy in British Guiana

World ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-215
Author(s):  
Joshua Mullenite
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Model Development ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Hydrological Models ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Current Role

In this article, I review a cross-section of research in socio-hydrology from across disciplines in order to better understand the current role of historical-archival analysis in the development of socio-hydrological scholarship. I argue that despite its widespread use in environmental history, science and technology studies, anthropology, and human geography, archival methods are currently underutilized in socio-hydrological scholarship more broadly, particularly in the development of socio-hydrological models. Drawing on archival research conducted in relation to the socio-hydrology of coastal Guyana, I demonstrate the ways in which such scholarship can be readily incorporated into model development.

scholarly journals What matters? The role of values in transformations toward sustainability: a case study of coffee production in Burundi

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milda Nordbø Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Vital Role ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Coffee Production ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Dynamic Relations ◽  
Participatory Observation

AbstractThis paper examines the role of values in transformations toward sustainability. Values, generally defined as what people deem to matter, are increasingly gaining interest in and outside of academia. For example, sustainability aligns with specific values such as dignity, equality, safety, and harmony for people and nature. However, current approaches to values are mind-matter dualistic, and therefore failing to honor the inherently dynamic relations of socio-ecological systems. Drawing on new materialism, I explore values as part of the relations that make this world and propose to consider values as material-discursive practices. Ethnographic fieldwork was done in 2017 with coffee producers in Burundi who aimed to transform production by caring for the coffee and people that grow it. Based on interviews and participatory observation, I present how values were integral to transforming the relational aspects of coffee production. In this study, values of togetherness, care, dignity, and faith were dominant and were found to reconfigure the socio-ecological system of coffee production. I argue that values are inseparable from, and hence co-productive of, the material world that we experience and play a vital role in sustainability transformations.

Policing production

Focaal ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (61) ◽  
pp. 75-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Schrauwers
Keyword(s):  
Cotton Cloth ◽  
Cultivation System ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
Poverty Relief ◽  
Global Commodity Chains ◽  
State Expenditure ◽  
The Common ◽  
Relief Efforts ◽  
Reduced State

This article reexamines the Cultivation System in early nineteenth-century Java as part of an assemblage of Crown strategies, programs, and technologies to manage the economy—and more particularly, “police” the paupers—of the “greater Netherlands.” This article looks at the integrated global commodity chains within which the System was embedded, and the common governmental strategies adopted by the Dutch Crown to manage these flows in both metropole and colony. It focuses on the role of an early corporation, the Netherlands Trading Company, that also served as the administrator of poverty-relief efforts in the Eastern Netherlands where cotton cloth was produced. The article argues that corporate governmentality arose as a purposive strategy of avoiding liberal parliamentary scrutiny and bolstering the “enlightened absolutism” of the Crown. By withdrawing responsibility for the policing of paupers from the state, and vesting it in corporations, the Crown commercialized the delivery of pauper relief and reduced state expenditure, while still generating large profits.

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