Soil Politics
Abstract
This thesis investigates soil as a political material, which has been mobilised as an environmental laboratory to enable the transition from colonial forms of power towards late liberal governance. From the perspective of what I term “soil politics,” colonisation operates through the land, and continues to materialise in the present with the modification of soil’s chemical properties. In particular, I focus my research project on the global soil surveys initiated after the Second World War by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as a defining moment in the transformation of land from earthly matter into a techno-scientific assemblage, invested with the capacity to unsettle and reorganise modes of life. Through a combined analysis of cartographic and archival sources, interviews, and field work, I examine the consequences of the implementation of the surveys’ directives at different scales, to inquire in the present-day what the Soil Map of the World represents when experienced from the ground. The thesis is structured in four parts, Conflict, Settlement, Classification, and Resistance. Each part situates the effects of FAO’s Soil Map from different vantage points. These include archival and empirical research, comprising of interviews with soil scientists, State officials, and archivists; and a fieldwork component, where I record and document my encounters and engagements with populations and activist movements in rural areas directly affected by the policies outlined by FAO. In Conflict and Settlement, I investigate how settler colonial projects were underpinned by the techno-scientific adaptation of soils, which informed the political strategies of colonisation and of resistance. My investigation departs from the present-day uses of the soil samples extracted from Angola under colonial occupation in the period between 1946 and 1974, in relation to the outbreak of the independence struggles in 1961. In Classification and Resistance, I focus my research practice on the current ecological struggles in Alentejo, a rural region in the south of Portugal undergoing a radical environmental transformation. Departing from the political implications of Amilcar Cabral’s agronomic work in the region, I engage directly with the practices of scientific agronomy and local activist movements, in order to address the unresolved relation between environmental and political struggles.