著者

秋山 晶子

出版者

日本文化人類学会

雑誌

文化人類学 (ISSN:13490648)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.76, no.1, pp.77-88, 2011

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The anthropology of agriculture, especially ethnoagronomy, has explored the local/indigenous cognition of the environment, which is considered to be guiding practices, that is, transactions between humans and the environment. Previous studies of that perception have applied linguistic methodologies and investigated local classifications of plants and animals to extract the system of knowledge underpinned by locally shared logics. The perception and approach intend to position local knowledge as a more sustainable and rational one under given circumstances than Western/modern knowledge. However, it is also pointed out that local knowledge is not always logically designed to guide practices, but actual practices are led by a bundle of individual experiences or knowledge along with a situation. In the post-Green Revolution era of India, it no longer seems to be an adequate approach to derive such local knowledge, underpinned by Indian cosmology or inner logic, from linguistic data analysis either, hi a village of northeastern Kerala, for instance, countless number of actors, such as governmental officers, local/international NGOs, and agri-business entrepreneurs introduce different things and words (ideas) to promote organic agriculture, including organic certification, bio-input, and an ancient farming calendar. Each farmer then selects and applies things or words in a rather situational manner. In such a situation, not only is the local/Western binary of knowledge obscure, but local, Western, traditional, and "re-traditional" knowledge are also intertwined in farmers' dialogues and practices. Therefore, this paper avoids the assumption that local shared knowledge shapes farming activities tentatively. Instead, it attempts to perceive that collectives of symmetric non-human and human actors (actants) form farming practices, and attempts to describe the process of the assembly and separation of actants, especially focusing on non-humans. That is because local peculiarities are still embedded in the way of assembly and separation and in the performance of the assembling, even though observers can neither assume them nor hypothesize a logical system from them. Besides, some words perform as non-human actants, or comprise hybrid actants with other non-human actants. Thus, this paper follows certain actants, including such "thing-like" words. To do so, I especially focus on the practices of three farmers in a village in Kerala who changed their ways of farming after converting to organic agriculture. The examples show that farmers' initial performances are gradually directed by certain active non-humans, such as the regulation of organic agricultural certification, a traditional farming calendar, and plants and insects. In addition, a scrutiny of the process by which the actants assemble can shed light on locally specific ways of assembly and the performance of humans, non-humans, and words. The appearance, assembly and performance of actants are random and situational, so all an observer can do is to find changes in farming practices, following the process of those changes, while keeping an eye on the active actants. Even so, that approach indicates one way to disentangle the intermingled farming practices and figure out the spatially and historically localized aspects of farming practices.