Tag: agriculture

Themed Collection

Caring for women in a contaminated environment

Located in the Southeast of Mexico (Figure 1), the state of Chiapas is among the top 10 states in pesticides use (Bejarano González 2017). Since 2012, I have been conducting research in Chiapas on women’s reproductive healthcare. I collaborated with the Organization of Indigenous Doctors of the State of Chiapas (OMIECH in Spanish) to document the impact of reproductive health policies on Indigenous midwives’ practices. In rural areas, these women, who have acquired knowledge through their own experience of pregnancy birth and postpartum and/or trained with an older midwife, provide daily care to women and their families. As farmers, they are also acute observers of environmental change.

Figure 1: Map of Chiapas. Source: https://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=24530&lang=en

In May 2019, the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas hosted the First Mexican congress on agroecology. During the opening of the congress, voices in the audience started chanting, “Without feminism, there is no agro-ecology” (Figure 2). The group, made of a dozen women — researchers, activists, students, farmworkers, wanted to draw attention on the intersections between women’s rights and environmental sustainability. Later, during a roundtable, the founder of an “organic and feminist” coffee brand explained, “We need agro-ecology to be a choice for life (opción de vida). There can’t be agroecology if there is machismo, if there is violence, if there isn’t food on the table. Agroecology is a choice for our children’s lives.”

Figure 2: First Mexican congress on agroecology. The banner reads “Without feminism, there is no agroecology.” Picture by author.

In Mexico, over 180 highly hazardous pesticides component are authorized, including many forbidden by international conventions (Bejarano González 2017). Glyphosate residues have been found in industrial corn tortillas and human bodily fluids. A Tsotsil midwife in her late 30s from a village near San Cristóbal, told me she remembered when as a child her father started using pesticides in the milpa (cornfield). His own father told him to stop, but the damage was already done. “Even though he does not use it anymore, there is contamination everywhere. Everything is contaminated.” When “everything” around is contaminated – by mines, pesticides, corporations – what does caring for one’s family and community look like?

Indigenous women at the crossroads of environmental and reproductive justice

Midwives across the continent position themselves as defenders of women’s right to choose how to give birth and as protectors all forms of life – human and nonhuman (Dennis and Bell 2020). Kichwa environmental activist Elvia Dahua, leader of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon described this relationship in an interview for the Tejiendo Cuerpos Territorios (Weaving Body Territories) platform: “Us women, we are those who work the land. The first who chose the water to drink, to feed the children, the husband. This is why us, we know the value of mother-earth, how we can care for nature, how we can care for the earth, the territory, because the territory is our market, the territory is our pharmacy where we can find ancestral medicine.”[1] To express the intersection in which Indigenous women stand Katsi Cook, Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne midwife, coined the term environmental reproductive justice: “Environmental justice and reproductive justice intersect at the very center of woman’s role in the processes and patterns of continuous creation” (Cook 2007:62).

In Chiapas, Indigenous women have been at the forefront of the defense of the territory (Olivera Bustamante, Cornejo Hernández, and Arellano Nucamendi 2016; Valadez 2014). They draw on their multiple experiences as mothers, midwives, farmers and community leaders to raise awareness on the health and cultural consequences of environmental change. Midwives have a close relationship with their environment, in which they find medicine to cure their patients during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum (Icó Bautista and Daniels 2021). During a meeting of midwives in Mexico, organizations from various countries of Abya Yala[2] shared a statement highlighting the importance of caring for all forms of life. Their discourse interwove the sacredness of birth and Indigenous peoples’ strong connection to the earth: “Caring for the way we are born means defending the sacred link that binds us to the earth […]. We fully trust women and their babies’ embodied knowledge and the strength of mother-earth. This is why we rely on its [natural] elements to maintain balance and put ourselves at the service of life and its cycles” (Consejo de Abuelas Parteras Guardianas del Saber Ancestral de México et al. 2018). Contamination threatens this balance in many ways. One of the forms I have documented in my research is the impact on medicinal plants, which midwives use on a daily basis.

Caring when plants disappear

For thirty-five years, the OMIECH has organized community health workshops in Indigenous communities of the state. The goal of the organization is to strengthen Indigenous medical knowledge. The Women and Midwives Section, coordinated by Micaela Icó Bautista, organizes community workshops focused on pregnancy, birth, postpartum and on common diseases in the communities (Icó Bautista and Daniels 2021). In these workshops, participants share how they cope with common illnesses, by sharing medicinal plant recipes, massage indications and spiritual ceremonies. Knowledge exchanged during workshops is then compiled into booklets that are shared back in the villages.

Figure 3: Searching for medicinal plants in the milpa, 2015. Photo by author.

In 2014-2015, I helped organize some of the workshops. One of them took place in a community in the municipality of Huixtan, where Micaela Icó Bautista and I met with Doña Lupe, a Tseltal midwife in her 50s, and member of OMIECH. When we arrived, we followed the midwife and her son-in-law into the milpa behind the house, where they searched for medicinal plants that would be used as props during the workshop (Figure 3). As soon as the workshop started, participants listed the common diseases of women, men and children in the community. In the second part of the workshop, all were invited to share their knowledge about local remedies.

A few years later, in 2018, Micaela returned to the same village. When I met with her a few months later, she described how, during the workshop, older midwives like Doña Lupe recalled the chikin burro (“donkey’s ear,” a mix between the Tseltal word for ear, chikin, and the Spanish word for donkey, burro) a medicinal plant used during childbirth and postpartum.[3] Younger women were puzzled about the name, and started laughing, not knowing it was a medicinal plant. Micaela reported, “The parteras they said that before there were plenty of this plant, but now it is becoming scarce. In the hills, there are barely any left.”

In the workshop’s minutes, women attributed the disappearance of the chikin burro to a combination of factors, including deforestation linked to the construction of new roads, a shift in agricultural practices (from family-based to industrial), and the use of pesticides. Chikin burro was not the only plant affected, they added, “Plants like epazote, coriander, green tomato… They are disappearing. They used to grow in the milpa and now they don’t anymore, because of the pesticides. It all started 5 years ago, but only now they are realizing that it is hurting the earth.” During the workshop, Doña Lupe poignantly described the consequences of such a loss, saying, “it is like putting an end to part of community life.” The situation in Huixtan is not unique, and across Mexico Indigenous peoples experience how the loss of plants is also a loss of their language (Arriaga-Jimenez, Perez-Diaz, and Pillitteri 2018).

With disappearing plants, and the health impacts of environmental contamination, midwives are confronted to new diseases while their tools to cure are getting scarcer. For María del Carmen, a 38-year-old midwife who lived nearby the town of Comitán, and who started attending births when she was 17, “There have been changes in women’s health because of bad eating habits. Since childhood, they eat Sabritas (chips), candy, ham, cheese… This is not eating! In the past, we ate a lot of mushrooms from the forest. Not anymore. And women, they don’t even listen to us anymore. From there, complications arise: hemorrhage, miscarriage…”

During my work with Micaela Icó Bautista, I noticed the increasing trouble she faced in collecting recipes when editing the boletines; there were each time fewer people to share recipes, as older midwives passed away and some plants were more difficult to find. But she tirelessly asked midwives about their “secrets” (Icó Bautista and Daniels 2021), and encouraged them to start their own medicinal garden, to keep transmitting the knowledge which is essential for the health of women and their families, and the cultural reproduction of Indigenous communities.

Mounia El Kotni (PhD, SUNY Albany 2016) is postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the Cems-EHESS Paris, and 2019-2021 Fondation de France grantee in environmental health (grant n. 00089806). She has conducted research on maternal health policies in Mexico, and the consequences on traditional midwives’ practices since 2013. Her current research is focused on the gendered politics of environmental contamination and environmental protest in Chiapas. Contact: www.mouniaelkotni.com

References


Arriaga-Jimenez, Alfonsina, Citlali Perez-Diaz, and Sebastian Pillitteri
 2018   Ka’ux Mixe Language and Biodiversity Loss in Oaxaca, Mexico. Regions and Cohesion 8(3). Academic OneFile: 127-.


Bejarano González, Fernando, ed.
 2017   Los Plaguicidas Altamente Peligrosos En México. Texcoco, Estado de México: Red de Acción sobre Plaguicidas y Alternativas en México, A. C. (RAPAM).


Consejo de Abuelas Parteras Guardianas del Saber Ancestral de México, Consejo de Abuelas Parteras Guardianas del Saber Ancestral de las Américas, Nueve Lunas S.C., Oaxaca, et al.
 2018   Pronunciamiento. Foro “Partería, Cultura, Ancestralidad y Derechos”. Oaxaca, México.


Cook, Katsi
 2007   “Environmental Justice: Woman Is the First Environment.” In Reproductive Justice Briefing Book; A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change Pp. 62–63. Pro-Choice Public Education Project.


Dennis, Mary Kate, and Finn McLafferty Bell
 2020   Indigenous Women, Water Protectors, and Reciprocal Responsibilities. Social Work 65(4): 378–386.

Icó Bautista, Micaela, and Susannah Daniels
 2021   OMIECH: Traditional Maya Midwives Protecting Women’s Health. Cultural Survival Quarterly 45(1): 26–27.
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/omiech-traditional-maya-midwives-protecting-womens-health

Olivera Bustamante, Mercedes, Amaranta Cornejo Hernández, and Mauricio Arellano Nucamendi
 2016   Organizaciones campesinas y de mujeres de Chiapas. Movimiento Chiapaneco en Defensa de la Tierra, el Territorio y por el Derecho de las Mujeres a Decidir. Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas, Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centroamérica.
http://repositorio.cesmeca.mx/handle/11595/877, accessed May 30, 2018.


Valadez, Ana
 2014   Saberes Femeninos En El Ámbito Comunitario Campesino. Contrahegemonía, Defensa Del Territorio y Lo Cotidiano En La Lacandona. In Más Allá Del Femenismo. Caminos Para Andar. Márgara Millán, ed. Pp. 145–154. México, D.F: Red de Femenismos Descoloniales.

[1] Interview available at https://youtu.be/pzqkOdb76A4

[2] The Kuna word for territory, used by Indigenous activists to refer to the American continent in a decolonial position.

[3] I was not able to retrieve the Latin name of the plant.

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After the earthquake: Edolo people and their gardens in rainforest

In a previous post to EnviroSociety we described the immediate impacts of a huge earthquake on Edolo people of Papua New Guinea. At the time we wrote, the people were in desperate straits, with minimal access to government services and reliant on support from several mission-connected NGOs. In this sequel, three years later, we write of ways in which the people themselves have been re-establishing a hold on what had been, and in places still remains, a shattered landscape.

Through the early months of 2018, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, and a swarm of subsequent shocks, had devastating impacts on the land, rivers and people on and near Mount Sisa, in Hela Province, Papua New Guinea (Figure 1, Zahirovic et al. 2018). Edolo-speaking people living on the steep southern slopes of that extinct volcano were seriously affected (Dwyer and Minnegal 2018). Some were buried under huge landslides (Figure 2). Most abandoned their small villages (Figure 3) and fled to either Dodomona or Huya, the only places with airstrips and radio connection to the outside world. At these two villages populations increased from a few hundred men, women and children to one and a half thousand.

Figure 1. Map of portion of Papua New Guinea showing epicenter of the magnitude 7.5 February 2018 earthquake and epicenters of some of the subsequent swarm of earthquakes. Epicenter locations are from Mahoney et al. (2021). The area outlined as A is shown in Figure 2; the area outlined as B is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 2. Loss of forest cover in the Mount Sisa area in 2018 and earlier. The white line marks an escarpment that spans altitudes of about 1,000 to 1,200 m ASL. Locations of primary villages are shown as white dots. Most areas colored blue lost forest cover as a result of landslides. Most of those close to Huya, however, are areas cleared to make gardens after the first earthquake.

Figure 3. Satellite imagery showing landslides in the vicinity of the villages of Galoma, Fau, Namosado and Bobole. On each figure, an estimate of pre-earthquake population size at that village is shown in parentheses.

Nearly all food of Edolo people comes from a diverse array of practices that include gardening, arboriculture, sago processing, pig husbandry and hunting (Kelly 1977: 32-64, Dwyer 1990). Access to store-bought foods, though desired, is limited and intermittent. In 2018, the rapid increase in population at just two locations meant that local food supplies were overwhelmed. For months, people needed supplementary support from outside relief organizations (ADRA 2018).

Three years have elapsed since those earthquakes. Here we draw on satellite imagery to describe responses by Edolo people who lived at, or relocated to, Huya.1 Many people made gardens south of Huya, in an area that had seen little use over several decades. For them, this shift in the geography of garden locations may have far-reaching effects on overall subsistence practices and, indeed, on concomitant social practices and health.

Huya

The Huya airstrip was made over a period of 10 years. The first plane landed there in early 2003 and, since then, it has been served by planes associated with Summer Institute of Linguistics and Mission Aviation Fellowship. By 2016, the population at Huya was 192 men, women and children.

The first earthquake struck on 26 February 2018. Through the next weeks men, women and children from Galoma, Aya, Fufuleya, Fau, Damalia, Namosado and Bobole (Figure 2) sought refuge at Huya. Many built temporary houses alongside the airstrip and made small garden plots near these (Figure 4B). Through the next two years the refugees built more than 100 houses on ridgetops near to, and immediately west of, the airstrip (Figure 4C).

Figure 4. A Huya airstrip and surrounds before the earthquake of February 2018. Houses of Huya residents are visible at the northern end of the airstrip close to a major walking track. B. Refugee houses and household gardens established near the airstrip by May 2018. C. Huya airstrip and surrounds in about May 2019 showing houses built by refugees. Most houses are roofed with tarpaulins that were provided as emergency aid. Others are thatched with fronds from sago palms.

The location of gardens, 2018

Soon after displaced people arrived at Huya they commenced fencing and felling areas of forest to establish gardens that were secure from both wild and domestic pigs. In 2018, people felled 62 ha in an area of approximately 525 ha near Huya (Figure 5). In 2016-17, they had felled only 2 and 5 ha, respectively, in the same area.

Figure 5. Loss of forest cover (pink) between Giwa River in the west and Sioa River in the east. Separate figures are provided for 2016-17, 2018 and 2019-20. The 720 m contour is shown; the summit of Mount Sisa is at 2,689 m ASL. North and south of Huya, soils overlie volcanic rock; between these is a zone where soils overlie sedimentary rocks. The lighter green coloring of much of this intervening zone is because it has been used extensively for gardening and is covered in regrowth forest. Most forest cover loss in 2018 was caused by earthquakes with huge landslides along the entire length of the escarpment. There were additional landslides in 2019. The dashed red circle has a radius of 3 km. The circled areas in the lowest section of the figures (altitude 550-650 m) enclose gardens, subsequent extensions to those gardens and, by at least 2019, identifiable houses. (Geological detail after Mahoney et al., 2021.)

In the years 2014 to 2017, the area of forest cover loss associated with the villages of Galoma, Aya, Fufuleya, Fau, Damalia, Namosado and Huya was equivalent to 0.085 hectares per person per year for approximately 950 people. Virtually all this will have been the result of clearing forest to make gardens. However, when village sites remain in much the same place for a decade or more some gardens, made in relatively young regrowth, will not be detected as ‘forest cover loss’ in satellite imagery. With allowance for complications of this sort we think that the 62 hectares felled near Huya in 2018 will have provisioned 400 or more people through a 12-month period. This effort, therefore, reflects a capacity of Edolo people to respond relatively rapidly and effectively to disastrous circumstances.

By late 2018 at least eight small gardens had been cut into advanced regrowth near Bobole (Figure 6). Some people either remained at Bobole or returned there soon after the earthquake. An early return is not unexpected. Many more people lived at Bobole than at the other communities which relocated to Huya. Further, for more than five decades, exchanges of goods and people between Edolo and the highlands has been through Bobole and it continues to be a focal way-station for highlanders who walk to and from Kiunga, more than 200 km to the west, to explore prospects for employment at the Ok Tedi mine, to engage in alluvial mining or to exchange marijuana for guns with people from the Indonesian province of Papua.

The location of gardens, 2019-20

In 2019-20 people commenced clearing forest to make gardens at greater distances from Huya. In these two years they felled only 26 and 12 ha respectively in the area of 525 ha near Huya but felled an additional 44 (2019) and 39 (2020) hectares within 3 km of the airstrip. Much of this was to the north of Huya (Figure 5).

By October 2019 some forest areas south of Fau were being fenced (Figure 6) but, other than at Bobole, it is not until late 2020 that we detect unambiguous signs of substantial areas of garden being prepared near previously abandoned villages. This was most striking near Galoma and indicates resettlement of this area.

Figure 6. Satellite images showing early felling and perimeter fencing in the preparation of post-earthquake gardens near Bobole, Fau and Galoma. For Bobole the month each garden was commenced is indicated. These images of gardens in progress conform to patterns seen at Bobole in the late 1970s (Dwyer 1990: 32-4).

In 2019 and 2020, however, people made more extensive use of forest areas south of Huya than they had done in the previous decade. In Figure 5 the dotted white line encloses an area of 5.64 kha south of Huya. Forest cover loss from this area averaged 5.43 ha/year for the period 2011 to 2017 and, thereafter, increases from 22 ha in 2018 to 48 and 53 ha in, respectively, 2019 and 2020 (Figure 7). The 53 ha of garden in 2020 may have been enough to satisfy much of the agricultural requirements of 300 or more people across 12 months. It appears that many of the families who were displaced to Huya chose to relocate to areas that had been least damaged by landslides.

Figure 7. A. Forest cover loss in an area of 5.64 kha south of Huya (see Figure 5). B. Forest cover loss (pink) from an area east and south of Huya in 2012. The comparatively high value for forest cover loss in 2012 seen in the histogram is attributed to extensive windfall in the northeast corner of the area outlined in Figure 5 by a dotted white line. In the same year a substantial landslide removed forest cover where the Libano River cuts through the escarpment.

Concluding remarks

Three years after the earthquakes of 2018, the spatial patterning of Etolo subsistence gardens does not yet resemble earlier patterns. By late 2020 gardens had been made in the vicinity of most former villages but many people remained at Huya and some, probably several hundred, had redirected gardening effort to the south, well away from the escarpment near which they had lived before. For these people, long-term outcomes may be significant.

The 1974 Sisa topographic map (PNG 1:100,000 Topographic Survey, Sheet 7485, Series T683), compiled from aerial photography and colonial government patrol reports, does not show a single garden site, area of regrowth or house between 250 and 760 m ASL in the area between Giwa and Sioa rivers. Thus, some Edolo people are currently establishing a foothold on land that has been free from residential impacts for at least five decades.

To make gardens in this area people will be felling trees in primary forest rather than advanced regrowth. This will entail considerably more effort for each hectare of garden that is made. They will be planting crops in soils that overlie volcanic rock rather than sedimentary rock and this is likely to influence patterns of both crop selection and garden production (cf. Sillitoe 1998). At the lower altitudes, conditions will be less favourable than before for sweet potato and more favourable for taro. Sago palms, fish and wild pigs will be more accessible than before but because the forested slopes of Mount Sisa, north of the escarpment, will be further from living places opportunities to hunt and trap game mammals will be reduced (Dwyer 1990: 69-84). At lower altitudes, too, exposure to malaria will be increased. All these impacts will, ultimately, call for modifications to ways in which people schedule subsistence tasks and allocate tasks between men and women (Dwyer 1986).

To the extent that relocation to the south is sustained, people may well be tempted to redirect some social contacts to Kaluli-speaking communities who live south of Sioa River, and who, for many years, have been better placed for access to the outside world than those who live on the precarious slopes of Mount Sisa.

Coda: or a little of what we don’t know

Satellite imagery has allowed interpretations of some post-earthquake gardening practices by Edolo people who live in the vicinity of Huya. Those images, however, do not provide any information about impacts on three other important practices – sago processing, marita pandanus (P. conoideus) orcharding, and pig husbandry.

North of Huya, some groves of sago palms and some pandanus orchards will have been destroyed by landslides.2 Sago palms will be available at lower altitudes though here, for newcomers, issues of ownership will complicate access. Marita, however, does not grow wild and will not be immediately available in forests south of Huya. In 1979-80, 109 people at Bobole maintained about 10 ha of pandanus orchards. The oily fruit was abundant from November to May (Dwyer 1990: 61-63). It is likely that, by late 2018, people who had relocated to Huya made excursions to their orchards to harvest fruit. But for those who settle to the south it will be three or more years before newly planted marita bear fruit.

As is common elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, pigs are important to Edolo as a feast food and in many social exchanges. In the late 1960s and 1970s the ratio of domestic pigs to people at Gabulusado (since relocated to Aya) and Bobole approached parity and most of the animals were allowed to roam freely through areas of regrowth (Kelly 1988, Dwyer 1990: 55-61). When people moved to Huya immediately after the earthquake, women may well have carried small piglets with them but most animals will have been left behind. Some domestic pigs were probably killed in landslides, others may have become feral. Pigs, however, are highly valued. It is likely that as refugees became established at Huya, and anxiety levels subsided, some visited former living places to check on the well-being of surviving pigs. Certainly, in the months after the earthquake some people travelled out from Huya to harvest gardens and retrieve abandoned chickens (Jan Gossner, pers. comm.).

In future post-pandemic times, it may be possible to ground-truth, revise and enlarge upon these observations of ways in which Edolo people are responding to a devastating event in their lives. This would have positive outcomes both in identifying ongoing needs of those people and in addressing questions about the relative success, over a span of years, of practices people adopt when seeking a path to secure living after experiencing extreme perturbation.

Notes

Thanks to Jan Gossner, Sally Lloyd, Anton Lutz, Luke Mahoney, Peter Pyandea and Russ Stephenson for valuable help and information.

1. ‘Global Forest Change’ (https://glad.earthengine.app/view/global-forest-change) provides annual depictions of forest cover loss ‘defined as a stand-replacement disturbance, or a change from a forest to non-forest state’ (Hansen et al. 2013). In regions dominated by rainforest, such as those where Edolo live, most forest cover loss is the result of clearing for gardens, village sites and airstrips or landslides, storm-related tree fall and, less often, fire. ‘Global Forest Watch’ (https://www.globalforestwatch.org/) is a companion site that allows forest cover loss to be tracked and, for defined areas, quantified on a year-by-year basis or, cumulatively, over a series of years. Planet Explorer (https://www.planet.com/explorer/) provides monthly collations of satellite imagery that for the Mount Sisa area date back to 2016. These allow cross-referencing when interpreting imagery provided by Global Forest Change, Global Forest Watch, Google Earth, Bing Maps and Satellites.pro. We have drawn on all these resources in the present analyses.

2. Many sago palms are visible below the collapsed escarpment on the righthand side of the photograph that heads this article.

References

ADRA (Adventist Development Relief Agency) 2018. “ADRA responds to PNG earthquake.” https://www.adra.org.au/adra-responds-to-png-earthquake/

Dwyer, Peter D. 1986. “Living with Rainforest: The Human Dimension”, pp. 342-67 in J. Kikkawa and D. Anderson (eds), Community Ecology: Pattern and Process. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Melbourne.

Dwyer, Peter D. 1990. The Pigs That Ate the Garden: A Human Ecology from Papua New Guinea. Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press.

Dwyer, Peter D. and Monica Minnegal. 2018. “Refugees on their own Land. Edolo People, Land and Earthquakes.” EnviroSociety, 9 June 2018. www.envirosociety.org/2018/06/refugees-on-their-own-land-edolo-people-land-and-earthquakes

Hansen, M. C., P. V. Potapov, R. Moore, M. Hancher, S. A. Turubanova, A. Tyukavina, D. Thau, S. V. Stehman, S. J. Goetz, T. R. Loveland, A. Kommareddy, A. Egorov, L. Chini, C. O. Justice and J. R. G. Townshend (2013) “High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change.” Science 342 (6160): 850-53.

Kelly, Raymond C. 1977. Etoro Social Structure: A Study in Structural Contradiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kelly, Raymond C. 1988. ‘Etoro Suidology: A Reassessment of the Pig’s Role in the Prehistory and Comparative Ethnology of New Guinea’, pp. 111-86 in J. F. Weiner (ed.), Mountain Papuans: Historical and Comparative Perspectives from New Guinea Fringe Highlands Societies. Ami Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 

Mahoney, Luke, Richard Stanaway, Sandra McLaren, Kevin Hill and Eric Bergman (2021) “The 2018 Mw 7.5 Highlands Earthquake in Papua New Guinea: Implications for Structural Style in an Active Fold and Thrust belt.” Tectonics https://doi.org/10.1029/2020TC006667

Sillitoe, Paul 1998. “Knowing the Land. Soil and Land Resource Evaluation and Indigenous Knowledge.” Soil Use and Management 14: 188-193.

Zahirovic, Sabin, Gilles Brocard, John Connell, and Romain Beucher 2018. “Aftershocks Hit Papua New Guinea as it Recovers from a Remote Major Earthquake.” The Conversation, 9 April.

Peter Dwyer is Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Monica Minnegal is Associate Professor of anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Since 1986, they have conducted research among Kubo, Febi, and Bedamuni people of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, with a particular emphasis on social change and, most recently, impacts of the PNG LNG project on people’s lives. Their book Navigating the Future: An Ethnography of Change in Papua New Guinea was published in 2017 by Australian National University Press.

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Cultivating an Outer Space Ecology: Introducing the On-Orbit Gardener

Part of a series commissioned in 2009 by NASA for an exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center, the “Farmers Wanted” poster above is only one of many advertising for humanity’s resettlement on Mars. The series, Mars Explorers Wanted, includes other posters with text such as “We Need You”—an astronautical replica of Uncle Sam and the infamous army recruitment poster—and advertisements for Mars teachers, technicians, and explorers. Although depicted as archetypes of Space Western sci-fi, these posters are no longer far from reality. Since the 1960s NASA, the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos State Corporation), and the ESA (European Space Agency) have been developing tools and methods to take humanity’s endeavors deeper into the unknowns of outer space and for longer, possibly permanent, periods of time. An integral part of this increasingly global, or even interplanetary, mission is not only designing equipment able to withstand the speculated conditions of outer space environments but also designing environments and ecologies to sustain those who venture above.

Read More “Cultivating an Outer Space Ecology: Introducing the On-Orbit Gardener”

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Taste Environments: Linking Agrobiodiversity and Food Security in the Bolivian Andes

In the first farming settlement of the [Andean] cold country I should place emphasis on the second-rate tuber crops—oca, ulluco, and añu … They are inferior in food value and in yield to potatoes, but are maintained in cultivation by highland Indians from Colombia to Peru and are grown in the same fields as potatoes. There are numerous races of each, and all three are man-made species, remote from wild kin. It is difficult to believe that people who had passably satisfactory potatoes to hand would have given attention to transforming such wild plants into root crops which provided nothing that was not better provided by potatoes. On the other hand, if the minor tubers were developed first, they might retain a place in Indian cooking because of traditional dishes and old taste preferences. Wherever there are highland Indian communities these tubers still are much used; white people do not care for them. (Sauer 1969: 50–51)

There are few activities less charismatic than the write-up period of a dissertation. Having returned from my fieldwork in Bolivia a little more than a year ago, my days are currently somewhat fragmented. I read or reread segments of books, I search my field notes for particular experiences, or I spend hours cleaning a handful of survey variables.

But from time to time, like when I stumbled across this opinionated passage by the formidable agricultural geographer Carl Sauer, a thread linking the fragments snaps taut. I went to Bolivia to study precisely the crops that Sauer dismisses. To him they were “second-rate,” but to many contemporary Bolivian farmers, chefs, and agrobiodiversity conservationists, these crops are rare delicacies to be valued and protected.

Charismatic potatoes at an agrobiodiversity fair in Candelaria, Colomi, Bolivia. (Photo: Alder Keleman)

There are many things about this passage in Sauer that we might question today. For example, we might treat with skepticism the assumption of a simple periodization of cultivar types, wherein primitive people plant minor tubers, like oca and ulluco, and more modern ones plant potatoes. So, too, should his slippage into a simple racial binary dividing “Indian” from “white” raise warning bells for the contemporary reader.

But what interests me about this passage is not only how current anthropological thought would revise it. Rather, I’m drawn to a simpler expression therein: despite his life’s work of cataloging the diversity of American agriculture, Sauer, it seems, had little affinity for Andean foods.

It strikes me as curious that a figure who spent so much of his life understanding and celebrating the diversity of the world’s crops might also so easily dismiss a few of them as “second-rate.” But then again, perhaps it isn’t; Sauer, too, had taste buds, and surely also had his own likes and dislikes. These very human qualities tap into deeper questions: What makes people decide they like certain foods, while they simply can’t stomach others? And what turns these likes and dislikes from individual idiosyncrasy into collective preference? In other words, I wonder, what relationships link taste to culture and environment?

These musings may seem esoteric, but I see them as more than trivial. My research is on the role of agrobiodiversity in household food security and food culture in Cochabamba, Bolivia. This region presents a real conundrum. Cochabamba is agriculturally rich, both in the sense of yield potential and in the diversity of crops it produces, but it nonetheless exhibits some of the highest levels of child malnutrition in the Western Hemisphere. These problems are more marked in rural areas—seemingly anomalous, given the potential of many of these areas to produce an ample and diverse diet.

A plate of oven-baked cuy (guinea pig), prepared by a women’s group in Kayarani, Colomi, for an annual food security fair. (Photo: Gonzalo Tiñini Huanca)

While economic inequality and a long history of racial oppression are obvious culprits for these outcomes, I also wonder about the role that an oft-overlooked element of food security may play in the development of malnutrition. The FAO’s definition specifically stipulates that food security, among other characteristics, describes a diet that meets one’s “preferences.” But the idea of preferences contains a cultural wild card. It is easy to imagine what a “healthy” and “complete” diet might consist of, from the perspective of Western science, but this gives us little sense of what food security might look like (or taste like) to the average Bolivian.

Indeed, just as Sauer expressed marked opinions about Andean foods, I observed Bolivians articulating very particular preferred “taste ways.” A case in point: I am married to a South Asian vegetarian. On my husband’s first visit to the field, we prepared an Indian meal for my Bolivian colleagues, many of whom were agronomists or nutritionists from local institutions. We put together what we thought was a fine spread: jeera rice, hand-rolled parathas, mint and cilantro lentils, and a spicy chutney, accompanied by a chicken korma, in a nod to the strong preference for meat in Cochabamba. Judging by our guests’ appetites, these were mostly well received.

But the evening was colored by our choice of beverage: a homemade, sweet-and-salty lemonade, garnished with toasted cumin seeds. This is one of my favorite South Asian beverages—refreshing on a cool day and a rehydration fluid to beat any other on the market. It hadn’t occurred to me that the dark yellow liquid, complete with floating brown specks, might be quite a shock to an unaccustomed palate. Two Bolivian friends later recounted the story of how they’d arrived at my apartment on that hot afternoon, thirsty after climbing three flights of stairs. They served themselves a generous portion—and promptly gagged.

Sweet and sour and salty and crunchy? In hindsight, I probably should have warned them.

Luckily, these colleagues took it in stride, and the story of the sweet-and-salty lemonade incident became a source of amusement rather than disgust. But this was far from the only moment when it became apparent that what I liked to eat seemed quite strange to my Bolivian interlocutors. I once had a long conversation with another colleague about my “flexitarianism.” My husband was vegetarian, I explained, and I ate meat occasionally but didn’t usually cook it, mostly because I simply didn’t crave it. I could tell by her questions that there was something in my occasional approach to meat that was utterly confusing. She understood complete vegetarianism, a sacrifice she had heard of people adopting for health reasons, and as a born-and-raised Cochabambina, she certainly understood carnivory. The idea that someone might just not want to eat meat every day, however, seemed to provoke deep skepticism.

Thinking about these instinctive likes and dislikes—Sauer’s, my colleagues’, and my own—leaves me wondering about the broader issue of taste. And here, I mean taste not in Bourdieu’s sense of “social distinction” (although there is some element of that as well) but more in the sense of “flavor.” How, I wonder, does the environment we inhabit, the environment we grow up in, influence the flavors we perceive as pleasing? How does it structure the flavors that we disdain?

In the early 1980s, ethnobotanist Timothy Johns did a study with a group of highland Aymara Bolivians, testing their taste perception and classification. While the taste testers had an affinity for sweet flavors, they expressed aversions to flavors that were sour, bitter, or salty. These aversions, he found, were ranked more strongly than aversions held by populations in other regions of the world, when calibrated on a comparable scale. Comparing these data with the foods reported in dietary recalls, Johns hypothesized that highland Aymara peoples’ preference for bland foods—i.e., starchy carbohydrates—might have to do with the frequent exposure to bitter plant toxins, like glycoalkaloids and saponins, in native Andean crops (Johns and Keen 1985).

Colomi potatoes in cross-section, in preparation for taste-testing. (Photo: Alder Keleman)

Indeed, as I am exploring in my dissertation, many Andean agricultural and culinary practices seem specially designed to reduce exposure to just such bitter chemicals. Taken in this light, perhaps my colleagues’ visceral disgust with the sweet-and-salty lemonade was more deeply rooted than I might have imagined—the result, one might imagine, of a deep cultural history of avoiding flavors that, in such a high-altitude environment, might well have indicated the presence of dangerous poisons.

This hypothesis, of course, is tricky territory. Anthropologists from Mauss to Geertz and beyond have cautioned against the perils of environmental determinism. In emphasizing the role of the environment in ritual, behavior, or preference, one does indeed run the risk of pitching environmental structures as overdeterminant while minimizing the agency of the people living in them.

Nonetheless, when I look at data from my own surveys of agrobiodiversity consumption, they show native crops, like oca, papalisa (ulluco), and isaño (año), accounting for as much as 65 percent of a household’s caloric consumption in rural Cochabamba, while they make up as little as 12 percent in urban areas just a few hours away. Typically, these crops are replaced not by other vegetables but rather by pasta, rice, bread, and meat. Some of this difference may be explained by access to markets, and some might be explained by income or other household resources. Still, I can’t help wonder whether perception of flavor itself isn’t an underlying driver of these contrasting dietary choices.

Anthropologists studying the interface of society and the environment have long been interested in “traditional knowledge,” or local and place-based ways of knowing. Though heavily structured field methods, like ethnolinguistic and ethnobotanical cataloging, have largely been replaced in recent years by studies of more fluid national and global processes, I wonder whether even these processes might not be illuminated by placing them in relationship to flavor. On some level, I would argue, we all know the world by its taste.


Alder Keleman Saxena is a PhD student in a combined program hosted by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Yale Department of Anthropology, and the New York Botanical Gardens. Her research is on the role of native and traditional crops in household food security and food culture in the Bolivian Andes. Recreationally, she likes to experiment with unconventional combinations of foods, flavors, and ingredients.


References

Johns, Timothy, and Susan L. Keen. 1985. “Determinants of Taste Perception and Classification among the Aymara of Bolivia. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 16, no. 3: 253–271.

Sauer, Carl O. 1969. Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.


Cite as: Kelemen, Alder. 2015. “Taste Environments: Linking Agrobiodiversity and Food Security in the Bolivian Andes.” EnviroSociety. 3 September. www.envirosociety.org/2015/09/taste-environments-linking-agrobiodiversity-and-food-security-in-the-bolivian-andes.