Museum of Natural History · 22 November, 10:05
In this talk, I will draw on my ethnographic relations with my interlocutor and co-theorist, Parmpal, an alternative farmer working to heal the paddy-wheat monoculture landscape and more-than-human health through practices of soil care and repair. The main question that undergirds this talk is: “What are the possibilities for (diasporic) belonging and healing ancestral loss enabled by practices of soil care?”. As Parmpal faces harsh border regimes and is denied the possibility of moving to Canada to be reunited with his children, and I grapple with rupture of relations with ancestral land and yearning for connection to the soil—turning to the soil, healing and becoming with the soil and it’s more-than-human life, emerges as a practice of liveability in an otherwise ruptured world.
Davina Kaur Patel is a medical doctor and anthropologist, whose research work explores the intersections of health and ecology amid socioecological crises. Davina’s doctoral monograph, “Unruly Ecologies: In the Remains of Punjab’s Green Revolution”, presents an ethnography of postcolonial science and more-than-human entanglements. In the remains of the Green Revolution in Punjab, where intensive paddy-wheat crop cycles have come to dominate the landscape, state agricultural scientists, capitalist farmers, and alternative cultivators are grappling with the socioecological consequences of decades of ecologically and economically intensive and progressively unviable farming. Following state scientists and alternative farmers through agricultural universities, demonstration fields, agricultural extension centres, government offices, permaculture and natural farms, Davina’s project explores how scientists and alternative farmers are navigating and responding to socioecological crisis as it manifests through interconnected bodies of soil, water, air, human and more-than-human beings in a fragile landscape; one in which the legacies of colonialism, Partition, Green Revolution, anti-Sikh riots and communal violence persist, and dreams of postcolonial development, political autonomy and ecological sovereignty still hold. Davina’s approach is informed by medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and planetary health, providing insight into multispecies care, ethics, and environmental justice.