Superweed amaranth: metaphor and the power of a threatening discourse

This paper analyses the use of metaphor in discourses around the “superweed” Palmer amaranth. Most weed scientists associated with the US public agricultural extension system dismiss the term superweed. However, together with the media, they indirectly encourage aggressive control practices by actively diffusing the framing of herbicide resistant Palmer amaranth as an existential threat that should be eradicated at any cost. We use argumentative discourse analysis to better understand this process. We analyze a corpus consisting of reports, policy briefs, and press releases produced by state extension services, as well as articles from professional and popular magazines and newspapers quoting extension specialists and/or public sector weed scientists or agronomists. We show how the superweed discourse is powered by negative metaphors, and legitimizes aggressive steps to eradicate the weed. This discourse reinforces the farmers’ techno-optimism master frame, contributes to deskilling of farmers and sidelines ethical concerns.

What’s the Story on Agriculture? Using Narratives to Understand Farming Households’ Aspirations in Meru, Kenya

In the limited research on farming aspirations, little attention has been paid to the narratives which frame and shape them, and the ways in which the aspirations of those who farm intersect with the goals of extension services. Drawing on multimethod research conducted in Meru County, Kenya, we demonstrate how aspirations are not only situated within a consideration of personal circumstances, but are shaped in crucial ways by networks of relations and by the perceived possibilities afforded by material and cultural resources. We further highlight the accounts of state extension agents that link a lack of engagement with the desires and needs of those who farm to the failure of agricultural development initiatives. We argue that an engagement with aspirations opens up a route to understanding the obstacles and potentialities that matter to those who farm and, as such, might enable more responsive development initiatives centred on the perceptions and desires of those who farm.

Placing the U.S. State in the Interior of China

Scholars acknowledge the role of U.S. missionaries in the expansion of U.S. influence across the Pacific. However, labeling their activities “informal” imperialism underplays their political ramifications. Missionaries were not simply beneficiaries of the state; they actively constructed it. Simultaneously, missionaries participated in the physical and discursive construction of local communities. This article examines the intertwined nature of these two processes—state-extension and place-making—through property disputes in the 1880s between Presbyterian missionaries and the local elite in Jinan, China. This case demonstrates how both state-extension and place-making generated conflicts between a range of Chinese and American actors. These tensions underscore the utility of understanding “place” and “state” not as static constructs but as products of dynamic social interactions.

Performing alternative agriculture: critique and recuperation in Zero Budget Natural Farming, South India

This article explores how 'Zero Budget Natural Farming', an Indian natural farming movement centered on its founder and guru Subhash Palekar, enacts alternative agrarian worlds through the dual practices of critique and recuperation. Based on fieldwork among practitioners in the South Indian state of Kerala and on participation in teaching events held by Palekar, I describe the movement's critique of the agronomic mainstream (state extension services, agricultural universities, and scientists) and their recuperative practices of restoring small-scale cultivation based on Indian agroecological principles and biologies. Their critique combines familiar political-ecological arguments against productionism, and the injustices of the global food regime, with Hindu nationalist tropes highlighting Western conspiracies and corrupt science. For their recuperative work, these natural farmers draw, on one hand, on travelling agroecological technologies (fermentation, spacing, mulching, cow based farming) and current 'probiotic', microbiological, and symbiotic understandings of soil and agriculture. On the other hand, they use Hindu nativist tropes, insisting on the exceptional properties of agrarian species native to, and belonging to India. I use the idea of ontological politics to describe the movement's performances as enacting an alternative rural world, in which humans, other-than-human animals, plants, mycorrhizae, and microbes are doing agriculture together.Keywords: agricultural anthropology; alternative agricultures; naturecultures; critique; ontological politics; small-scale cultivators; India; Kerala; Subhash Palekar