Cultivating Populism: The Politics of Agroecology in Cordoba, Argentina

Abstract

While Argentina may be a classic location in studies of populism, agroecologists are far from the traditional imagery of Peronist subjects. Unlike the unionized factory worker of Peronist lore, agroecologists are members of an alternative farming movement which uses the symbiotic relationships between plants to produce chemical free food. Working in Cordoba, Argentina, I sought to understand how agroecologists had become unlikely, yet reliable, members of the Peronist, political coalition. Liberal theories of politics suggest an idealist, immaterial conception of "the political." This is doubly the case for populism, which is read by liberals as well as by more revolutionary thinkers as purely discursive: the empty promises of a demagogue. Such understandings leave little room for examining the role in political subjectivation played by the plants and agroecological matter with which my interlocutors engaged. Where anthropologists have long argued for the importance of ecologies to shaping "the political" writ large, materialist and environmental anthropology have paid scant attention to populism. Based upon fifteen months ethnographic research with agroecologists, in this thesis I trouble conventional understandings of populism. I suggest that populism is an ideology and that this ideological commitment is fomented through engagement with the material world. My thesis suggests a novel approach to understanding populism, as well as engaging in debates concerning the politics of masculinity, embodiment, and environmentalisms. Show more