Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
symbolic frames that shape and legitimate structures.
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This repair practice
is a kind of “boundary work” (Gieryn 1983; 1995; 1999), a way to discur-
sively maintain or transform the frames around an ecology, but it can also
cast repair itself as the subject of debate and negotiation. Does a problem
exist? What exactly is the nature of that problem? And what is the best
way of solving it? The answers to these questions represent practical
attempts to shape the discursive frame for meaning and action, which, in
turn, lead to ideas about what form a structure can or should take. In
contrast, ecological repair is aimed at the institutionalized practices and
material structures that shape the production of capital within an ecology.
Clearly, these two sets of practices overlap, and, in fact, the case studies
that I present in subsequent chapters show that most repair draws on both.
The work of rhetorically defi ning a problem for repair goes hand in hand
with institutional forms of repair, providing a continuum from methods
of insect control to large-scale legitimation crises of the entire ecology
of power.
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The following section describes how growers and scientists
have historically navigated this ecology of power and negotiated its shape
through repair.
Science, Industry, and the State: A Brief History of Repair in Agriculture
The ties among agriculture, knowledge, and power have long been under-
stood by the state; without an adequate and affordable supply of food, it
is diffi cult to maintain rule for very long. Archeological evidence suggests
a relatively direct link between the stability of food production and the
viability of a political elite (Diamond 2005). This relationship is also
expressed in the stories we tell about food production and politics. For
example, in the Bible's Genesis story, Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt
by his jealous brothers, found favor with Pharaoh by interpreting a set
of strange dreams as a prophecy about seven years of bountiful harvests
followed by seven years of famine. Pharaoh was so impressed by this
advance warning that he put Joseph in charge of a project to hold back
grain during the plentiful years, in preparation for the lean ones. Early in
U.S. history, Thomas Jefferson believed that the nation's democracy was
directly dependent on the strength of its farming and saw the independent
family farm as a stabilizing force against class confl ict and economic
change.
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Even now, when less than 2 percent of the U.S. workforce is in
