A Tomato of the Floating World: Assembling Inle Lake's Cultural Ecology

Abstract

This thesis offers an object-oriented ethnography of Inle Lake's floating tomatoes. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and using the theoretical and methodological framework of assemblage, I investigate the relationship between the Inle tomato and the wider cultural ecology of Inle Lake. I focus on what the tomato reveals about the networks and relations that constitute the social, ecological, economic and political landscapes of Inle Lake. I argue that the tomato-assemblage is a complex configuration of precariously held together ecological, sociocultural, political and economic relations that are constituted by interactions between environments, markets, technologies, knowledges and power. I suggest that following the tomato-assemblage and its entanglements denaturalizes superficial perceptions of a "less-than-human" nature and reimagines a cultural ecology of Inle Lake that is shaped by contestation. I make the tomato-assemblage visible from a variety of vantage points that highlight how the overall configuration is brought into being and how there are often differing perspectives of connection and disconnect dependent on subject position. These vantage points explore the tomato as a material and symbolic linkage to ethnic territory; an attraction within the regional economy of tourism; a system of labour; a commodity valued in affective ways; a product of agricultural biotechnology; and an environmental threat. By ethnographically exploring the tensions involved in how this assemblage is held together I demonstrate that the cultural ecology of Inle Lake is not fixed, nor stable, but rather contingent on its parts and the ways in which they interact with each other. This research has implications for not only ongoing theoretical debates around the importance of centering the non-human in anthropological studies of human society and culture, but also for opening up alternative approaches to understanding topics of ethnicity, economy and ecology in Myanmar.