Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
social life, where order, adaptation, and change are structured yet fl uid,
omnipresent yet delicate.
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This way of thinking about social order works well for understanding
some aspects of the ecology of power that I have described. We can envi-
sion agriculture as a kind of structure that is dynamic and constantly
shifting. Changes in the context of farming, whether from new pest pres-
sures, volatile markets, or shifting government policies, can threaten the
production of the various forms of capital depicted in fi gure 1.2, requiring
growers and scientists to renegotiate and repair their practices to account
for these changes. The analogy of everyday conversation as social order,
however, only goes so far in explaining the case I am considering here.
Prior work has given little attention to either the material context of social
interaction or the power dynamics of structures beyond the level of inter-
personal interaction.
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Built environments like industrial agriculture point
to the need for a theory of how the social and the material are brought
together in systems of production, and how these systems are maintained
through the efforts of interested actors. In addition, a broader theory of
repair needs to account for disagreements about repair, particularly over
how repair should take place or whether something needs to be repaired
at all. In disputes over repair, order may likely be the result not of mutual
understanding but rather of power relations.
Figure 1.3 presents my framework for a broader theory of repair, includ-
ing two types of repair strategies and the repair practices used to work
toward these strategies. The fi rst distinction, between the repair strategies
of maintenance or transformation, points to the different goals and invest-
ments that actors may have in the particular structure of their social and
material ecology. Does this structure create capital for an actor? Does the
structure limit or create barriers for another actor and his or her interests?
These factors help explain why a maintenance or transformation strategy
of repair would be preferable to a given actor or group. Repair as mainte-
nance is an attempt to solve problems by making modest adjustments
to the elements within an established structure, keeping intact as much of
the system as possible while remedying the trouble. Repair as transforma-
tion is a more radical set of changes to the actual ecology, in which the
relationships between culture, practice, and environment are substantially
reordered. In most cases, repair as maintenance is the default strategy,
especially for those actors with signifi cant investments in the existing
