Alyssa Paredes: Living Downstream of Yourself on the Mindanao River
The Science and Technology in Asia online seminar series @ Harvard is excited to kick off our fall 2024 season with the following event on Tuesday, September 10, 10:30–11:45 ET.
Our speaker is Alyssa Paredes (University of Michigan), and the details of her talk are as follows:
LIVING DOWNSTREAM OF YOURSELF ON THE MINDANAO RIVER
Water is a part of plantation life regularly overlooked by land-centered approaches. In the Philippines’ southernmost island of Mindanao, waterways are also underappreciated as sites of inter-ethnic conflict in a region where land is the lightning-rod issue recognized as driving persistent violence. In this chapter, I follow various forms of externalized wastewater—effluent, runoff, and siltation—as they are carried from banana plantations and packinghouses into the tributaries of the Mindanao River Basin, the country’s second largest watershed system. In particular, I trace how upstream and downstream communities offer competing patterns of blame and notions of causality to explain the reality of water pollution. In the process, I critique what I call the upstream/downstream imaginary, a powerful frame for thinking about culpability and justice in interconnected ecosystems. In scholarly and public discourse alike, “living upstream” and “living downstream” reference not only one’s position along a river, but also the direction of causality and, thus, vulnerability and accountability. These idioms take on heightened stakes in Mindanao, where the cultural geographies of the “upriver” and “downriver” are the result of situated histories of Indigenous dispossession and settler hegemony. By recounting the disparate ways that Indigenous Lumad, Christian migrant, and Muslim Moro communities explain the development of “itchy water” in the rivers bordering the plantation, I argue against the imaginary, inherited by many environmental anthropologists, to make two seemingly simple points: first, there are never only two sides in the story of pollution; and second, ecological recompense is never only a one-way street.
About our speaker: Alyssa Paredes is a socio-cultural anthropologist at the University of Michigan with research interests in the human, environmental, and metabolic infrastructure of transnatnional trade. She uses multi-sited, multi-scalar, and multi-lingual methods to carry out immersive and socially engaged fieldwork in the Philippines and Japan. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology with distinction from Yale University. Her first book project, Plantation Peripheries: The Multiple Makings of Asia’s Banana Republic, tracks the dramatic shifts that occur between the Philippine region of Mindanao, where export bananas are among the most resource-intensive of all agricultural industries, to Japanese urban centers, where they are ubiquitous items that sell for cheap. Her work identifies the conventions of crop science, agrochemical regulation, market segmentation techniques, and food standards as arenas where actors contend over the commodity chain’s production calculus. In chronicling how local actors reinsert themselves into the very calculations that efface them, she ties together approaches in environmental and economic anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography, and critical food studies. More information on her research, publications, and teaching can be viewed on her website.
Zoom registration here.
Hope you will be able to join us for this and subsequent talks:
September 24 | Annapurna Mamidipurdi | „Three Stories and a Proposition: Innovation Theories from Handloom Weaving in India“
October 8 | Karine Chemla | “Historiography and History of Mathematical Symbolism: A View from Chinese Sources”
October 15 | Amit Prasad | „Contestations over Stem Cell Ethics and the US-China Tech War: What Should We Do with Their Orientalist and Colonial Framing?“
October 29 | Dafna Zur | „How to Talk to Martians: Socialist vs. Capitalist Science in Korean SF“
November 12 | Fei Huang | „Bathing through Time and Landscape: A Longue Durée History of Hot Springs in China (1000–1945)“
November 26 | Sulfikar Amir | „Living in a Hot City: Urban Heat Mitigation in Informal Settlements in Megacity Jakarta“
December 3 | Togo Tsukahara | „Environmental History in Transnational Networks: Climate History Described by Rangaku, Dutch Navy, and Japan’s Colonial Meteorology“