The theme of this year’s American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans was “ghosts.” Never before had I seen contributors cling so tightly to the organizing theme of this annual reunion. By the end, it seemed evident that most of us had run out of novel things to say about the phantasmic presences and apparitions that haunt North American academic anthropology, but nonetheless I felt compelled – for better or worse (!) – to share my own take as a discussant on a well-rounded panel on Agrarian Hauntings, organized by Andrea Rissing and Sarah Franzen (with additional participation by Emma McDonell and Amanda Hilton).
Here’s what I shared:
Agrarian Hauntings
Here there are ghosts of the past and future and present. There are phantasmic figures that shroud the land—crops once forgotten (at least by some, as McDonell notes) and others that may no longer be planted 50 years forward (as Rissing reports). Of course, people appear too, including those that land grant institutions, extension agents, land-owning oligarchs, beltway bureaucrats, and global policymakers refuse to recognize. These powerbrokers are a bit like police on the side of the road after a grisly accident: “there’s nothing to see here, folks.” But what they really mean is that there is nothing and no one here that they want you to see.
“Those are all just ghost stories,” they might even insist. And yet the hauntings only seem to persist.
There are the ghosts of the words not spoken, the ones that cannot be written down, the stories that complicate a cogent academic narrative, the variables that don’t fit into the suitability models, the trigger words that will flag your grant proposal in the federal system. The ghosts, Sarah Franzen writes, that will never end up being written about in any published work but still have shaped, and will continue to shape, the work we do.
What should one say about the felt presence of so many absences? What should one do with so much phantasma-graphic material?
I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I can offer some questions and perhaps a few quirky proposals.
- Who are the ghostly figures we want to invite in? And how might we do so?
With so many people and plants being pushed out of agrarian landscapes – whose work and presence feel vital to some kind of livable future – how do we, as ethnographers and anthropologists, welcome them in to find a seat at the table? Here I’m thinking about Sarah’s attempts to connect with extension agents at Southern and others at LSU that are willing to work in a different mode than the one most dominant in Louisiana ag. There are also the focus groups that Andrea conducted with farmers in the South and Midwest who point out that markets for climate-resilient sorghum are nonexistent but so too are agrarian lifeways for their children. Emma also invites in policy makers who want to realize the potential of so-called “neglected and underutilized crops” but seem to neglect those whose knowledge and labor underpins such plans. And Amanda helps us to think about abandonment (or abbandono)—and specifically that of olive groves and associated livelihoods—as its own kind of haunted landscape. She also calls attention to the vital link between remembering and justice—the work of honoring those who are no longer here or who might not be here much longer.
I’d encourage all of us to think about how these different kinds of invitations may help us to both imagine and enact a more accommodating agrarian anthropology in the 21st century. By this I mean an agrarian anthropology that seeks to build solidarities with those who might be treated as little more than ghosts in the system, or as Andrea observes, future ghosts on the land.
I’d also invite us to think about different forms such invitations might take. Recently, I’ve found inspiration from the OIKOS kinship economy working group at NYU that has published a little manifesto on Potluck Economics. In the face of austerity and Trump regime funding cuts (as many have alluded to here), they propose the potluck as one model for moving forward. Sometimes all you need is a table and the willingness to extend an invitation, and you’ll find that there’s a lot that we can begin to share together. Some may interpret this as a turning away from the world and its most daunting problems, but it’s also a way to focus on building solidarity with those who we are in community with or want to be in community with.
These conversations feel especially important now, because in all likelihood, AI will make much of this worse. It will rob people of jobs and their creative works, but it will also steal away more water and land to support data centers and their infrastructures, all while belching more carbon into the atmosphere. Recently, I read a journalist’s account of a farmer in the heartland who was bought out by Microsoft. They scraped 6 feet of rich black soil off the land to build a data center that now in all likelihood produces AI slop and “brain rot,” including the faux Italian variant which features figures with names like Chimpanzini Bananini. While this may sound like an indulgent detour from the papers at hand, this is about a future in which significant swathes of the agrarian landscape are nothing but ghosts themselves. This leads me to another question that may not be fully intuitive, but I’ll try my best to flesh out:
- How is hauntology, in some ways, inextricably linked to ontology? Or to be a bit more specific, how is the production of non-being fundamental to oppressive systems that we exist under and within?
Capitalism and modern industrial agriculture require the ongoing production of these ghosts, of these absences. Their enduring presence in our lives and in the landscape is sustained by moving people off the land, robbing them of their lives and labor, consolidating and standardizing cropping systems, feeding plants and animals and people fertilizers and pharmaceuticals to secure their survival in these now eerie environments. In the act of naming so many absences in the contemporary agrarian landscape, the paradox becomes evident. These systems can’t exist without the ongoing generation of ghosts.
All that’s solid melts into air. But it’s undeniable—the apparitions are all still here. And given where things are right now, the specters are primed for a population boom. It seems important that we find friendly ways now to call them in.
Nicholas C. Kawa 