Development Seminar

Kregg Hetherington speaks on ""Measuring politics and distributing pollution in the Paraguayan countryside"

March 15th,

12:00- 2:00 PM

Anthropology Building, AP246

19 Russel Street

Over the last decade, the convergence, in Latin America, of leftist and environmental politics has led to the emergence of new resources and harms, and inevitably to new practices of measurement and standardization of their distribution. Far from depoliticizing these disputes, the technical practices associated with distribution are often the most contentious, as opposing parties attempt to define simultaneously only the quantitative question of distribution and the ontological question of the matter to be distributed. In this paper I look at an intense political controversy surrounding the phytosanitary regulation agency in Paraguay, in which seemingly trivial practices of measuring pesticide safety buffers were so politicized as to contribute to the fall of a government. This is despite the fact that government opponents had no real quarrel with the way the agency carried out its technical work. To understand why, I read the new practices laterally against an older history of cadastral measurement which for decades has inserted functionaries into pitched battles between small farmers against large grain producers. I suggest that if we understand measurement practices not primarily as producing facts for the purposes of regulation but as augmentations of the objects they measure we might better appreciate the promissory and political dimensions of technical knowledge practices.

About Kregg Heatherington

Kregg Hetherington is a political anthropologist specialized in environmental conflict, regulation, the bureaucratic state and international development in Latin America. He received his PhD from UC Davis, completed a post-doc at the University of Toronto, and taught for three years at Dalhousie University before moving to his current position at Concordia in Montreal. His recent book, Guerrilla Auditors is an ethnography of peasant land struggles in Paraguay, and of how rural thinking about property and information come into conflict with bureaucratic reform projects promoted by international experts. He has recent and forthcoming articles in American Ethnologist, Economy and Society, and Cultural Anthropology, among other journals. His current research, primarily with Paraguayan bureaucrats and technicians, focuses on the way the soybean boom in Paraguay is transforming both the terrain of rural struggle and the shape of state itself.

Link to Kregg's website

http://socianth.concordia.ca/facultyandstaff/documents/KHetherington.php