Ph.D. candidates shibanee Sivanayagam and Eva Steinberg received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (of up to $25,000) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for their doctoral research.
Shibanee Sivanayagam‘s project is titled “Palmyrah Politics: Rethinking Region and the Subaltern in Northern Sri Lanka”
Palmyrah trees are part of a differentiated geography in Sri Lanka, correlating with the spatialization of ethnicity in the island; the trees exist in regions where Sri Lankan Tamils, a minoritized ethnic community, have historically been concentrated. The tree contributes to a sense of regional cohesion rooted in ethnicity and reproduces internal divisions along lines of caste and class. My project emerges from a concern that existing explanations of regional politics that focus on ethno-nationalism are incomplete and omit a history of division in the North rooted in caste and class. I argue that analysis of the political economy of the Palmyrah tree can help illuminate a more complex notion of subaltern politics in the region. Through twelve months of archival and ethnographic research, this project unpacks the differential impacts of political projects on regional unity and stratification through Palmyrah practices at various conjunctures. It considers how the movement of capital might help make sense of these changes by theorizing “the North” as a complex social formation (Hall 2021). Using the concept of “articulation”, it investigates how tensions between ethnicity, caste, and class in the politics of subaltern Palmyrah workers relate to configurations of unity and stratification.
Eva Steinberg‘s project is titled “Seeding the Future: Biodiversity, Adaptability, and Breeding Resilient Food Systems in a Changing Southeast”
This research examines the tensions between environmental preservation and adaptation by asking: How is biodiversity manipulated in anticipation of uncertain futures? I focus on four guiding questions: (1) How are plantation and colonial legacies manifest in southeastern seedways? (2) What valences of biodiversity are present in southeastern food systems? (3) How do plant breeders and seed savers use notions of purity and hybridity? (4) What affective registers are invoked in seed work? By participating in plant breeding projects, growing seeds with farmers, and working with the USDA germplasm bank, I study how these groups balance the need for adaptability with the need for stability as they attempt to plan for climate change. I draw from political ecology, science and technology studies, and affect theory to understand seeds as simultaneously biological and cultural. I contribute to the emerging field of critical ethnobotany, as I ask what social, economic, and political structures are reproduced alongside and through seed work. Additionally, my work is attuned to the temporality of seeds, as I look towards the historical conditions of possibility for plant breeding and the seed futures that seed growers, breeders, and stewards imagine and enact.
