Culture Agriculture Food and Environment最新文献

This article uses the case of Cinchona officinalis entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore how dynamics of care and extraction figure within the construct of multispecies solidarity. C. officinalis is an endangered medicinal tree that holds global historical significance as a natural source of quinine. In Loja, Ecuador, C. officinalis trees were extracted for their bark or “casarilla” to the point of near-extinction in the late 1800s. Today, the trees continue to play a significant role in local health knowledge and practice, making them vulnerable to exploitation when disease events spike demand for medicinal resources. During the COVID-19 pandemic, entrepreneurs played a unique role fostering solidarities with C. officinalis by developing cascarilla-based products that reduced pressure on wild trees while enabling local health practices. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with entrepreneurs, cascarilla harvesters, and consumers, the author uses the phrases solidarity through and solidarity with C. officinalis to highlight how seemingly instrumentalist interactions with medicinal species are tied to practices of care that enable more-than-human communities to navigate global health crises. Yet, as the following analysis highlights, the ability to enact solidarities with nonhuman species is strongly shaped by social status and economic resources. Ultimately, this article diversifies understandings of what multispecies solidarity can look like while critically engaging in questions of who is best positioned to participate. Such considerations are essential as communities prepare for futures in which pressures on medicinal species become more frequent amid recurring disease crises.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, global demand for ravintsara (Cinnamomum camphora ct 1,8-cineole), an introduced yet naturalized medicinal tree, surged due to its reputed antiviral properties. In Madagascar's highlands, informal distillers (mpitanika ravina) became essential workers, producing ravintsara essential oil around the clock with leaves supplied by equally informal collectors to meet urgent export orders. The labor of harvesting and distilling, or transforming leaves into a liquid therapeutic commodity for export, constitutes a critical but largely obscured node in the essential oil value chain. This article argues that the designation of essential extends beyond the product itself to encompass the work sustaining its production for alternative health markets during the pandemic. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Madagascar's Central Highlands, I examine how Malagasy workers ensured the continued production of plant-derived anti-virals under volatile market conditions, precarious labor arrangements, and pandemic restrictions. Rather than focusing on smallholder farmers or industrial exporters, this study centers on those situated between cultivation and export, specifically leaf collectors, still builders, distillery owners, and distillation workers. By attending to essential oil extraction, and the labor, infrastructures, and technical expertise it requires, the article demonstrates how informal workers sustain global supply chains, adapt to public health crises, and shape the production and circulation of alternative medicine commodities.

Based on interviews and participant observation activities conducted in 2024, this article investigates the perspectives and experiences of Illinois farmers cultivating CBD (cannabidiol) hemp. The 2018 U.S. Farm Bill legalized hemp, defined as cannabis containing < 0.3% delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the intoxicating compound found in marijuana. Hemp includes both non-intoxicating CBD varieties used to help alleviate anxiety, pain, and related disorders, and industrial varieties grown for fiber and food. Illinois passed a bill legalizing hemp agriculture in 2018, inspiring an explosion of interest among farmers in growing CBD. The first several years of CBD agriculture in Illinois followed a “boom and bust” cycle, with many farmers struggling to process and market their hemp. Six years after legalization, CBD growers remained suspended in a difficult transitional moment. They successfully overcame many of the initial challenges associated with growing and processing CBD hemp, but they still face profound legal gray areas and uncertainties. CBD may technically be legal, but it is enduringly illicit, as it is subject to lingering stigmatization and regulatory ambiguities that pose serious challenges for farmers. These issues have been exacerbated by the legalization of recreational marijuana in Illinois. The perspectives and experiences of these Illinois CBD farmers reveal the hidden political and social work involved in “pharming” cannabis, how farmers navigate regulatory uncertainty, and how the current structure of the U.S. cannabis industry pits smallholders and subsector stakeholders against one another, furthering trends toward corporate consolidation. This case study also illustrates how small farmers in the U.S. face pressures to innovate and diversify but often struggle to benefit from agricultural policies and programs that promote the adoption of novel crops.

This article investigates how the changing value of food due to the transition from famine to abundance after industrialization in the 1960s generated a shift in sociality and ways of being together in the Arbëreshë community, who immigrated to Molise during the sixteenth century. The fact that food remains a means of reaffirming and strengthening relationships during key rites of passage, such as marriage and death, can be considered representative of the power of eating—especially commensality and the gift of food—to create relatedness. However, the attraction of notions of “typical” and “local” food leads the community to package and stage “authentic” culinary festivals in an attempt to build touristic relationships. Focusing on why visitors attend such festivals, together with who they are, this article investigates the actors of returning tourism and the existential authenticity they seek from and among themselves. This study concludes by reflecting on the role that anthropological research can play in enabling locals and tourists to perceive a comprehensive vision of their community's sociocultural environment, relationships, history, and tradition through food culture; thus, they can achieve a more authentic sense of self and more satisfying engagement with the people and places around them.

This article outlines the process of developing a collaborative multi-sited oral history project on the history, traditions, and ongoing resilience of Black and Indigenous farm and garden practices in the Southeastern United States and Appalachia. The Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project is a collaboration between the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, the Spelman College Food Studies Program, and the Princeton Food Project. Our model used student oral historians that we trained in oral history methods and ethics. Our initial goal was to collect oral history interviews and develop an engaging open access multi-media archive. The project documents seed saving and gardening stories from people who have helped preserve Black and Indigenous foodways, including elders and newer generations of gardeners and small-scale farmers. The stories serve as an important record of heirloom practices with rich cultural traditions and knowledge. Collectively, the archive documents the movement of seeds, practices, and ideas across people and space. This article details our process of conceiving the project, building collaborations, and the results of 2 years of oral history collections in six different field sites. We believe this project can serve as a model for developing similar oral history projects.