Understanding agri-food systems as assemblages: Worlds of rice in Indonesia

Abstract

Agri-food ‘systems’ are exemplary of multiple realities, from that of traditional to modern, to alternative, among which contestation often occurs in a fight for political power. In a political economy narrative – mobilized by right- or left-leaning scholars – the credit (or blame) is by and large put on humans and institutions as the sole source of agency. These points of view, however, fail to address the complexity of human–nature relationships and often end up with monolithic frameworks and outcomes framed by essentialist categories that obscure as much as they reveal. As an alternative, we will elaborate on previous arguments regarding agency as a force distributed across multiple entities, both human and non-human (Dwiartama and Rosin 2014), informed by a vibrant materialist approach (Bennett 2007). In this work, we reveal the extent to which characteristics of a non-human actor (in this sense, a crop) shape the way agricultural practices and policies can be enacted. To do this, we engage with Mol’s (2002) concept of multiplicity to suggest that the political objective of a vibrant materialist approach in agri-food studies is to nurture a diversity of actions and practices shaped by the nature of non-human actors, and their alignment with the rest of the actors within an assemblage.