Anitha Castor Tingira

How do people build new relations with land in the wake of developmentalism and health governance? How does capitalist agriculture emerge unevenly, and in ways that arise from deeply emplaced histories? Over the past century, new technologies, chemicals, and global flows of capital have led to dramatic changes in agriculture worldwide, especially trending toward financialization and intensification of crop cultivation (Green 2022; Li 2014; Bernstein 2010). But these shifting economies of labor and land do not change in the same way everywhere. Moral values of what makes for “good” agriculture are rooted in material histories of place and politics (Ofstehage 2018; Matthan 2022). This research is sited in an old leprosy quarantine village which, for the first 50 years of its history, was wholly dependent on international aid. Within the past two decades, however, that funding has ceased, and the village has had to rapidly transition to a new agricultural economy. This shift demands that residents repurpose a quarantine landscape to create an agricultural landscape that depends entirely on crops for foreign export. Drawing on ethnographic, multimodal, and archival methods, this research asks how two generations of colonial and developmentalist governance shape the possibilities for land relations in the present. Co-PI’s: Rebekah Marie Ciribassi, Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe