Organizer: Department of Anthropology and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Type/Location: Hybrid / Ann Arbor, MI
Description:
The University of Michigan Department of Anthropology presents its fall 2025 Roy A. Rappaport Lecture Series, “Bananapocalypse: Un/Making Plantation Capitalism,” with Assistant Professor Alyssa Paredes:
Existential crises hang over the producers of the world’s food. Many of these challenges are self-inflicted. In the banana-growing regions of the Southern Philippines, which produce fruit for export to Japanese markets, plantations unleash pesticide drift, food waste, water effluent, and fungal pathogens into the surroundings. The plantocratic elite systematically shirks responsibility for these excesses, using legal contracts, scientific conventions, and standards of trade to frame them as “external” to their supply chains. However, plantation management is regularly proven wrong in its assumption that the things they try to push downstream will not double back to haunt them. Everyday actors on the plantations’ peripheries transform the devices designed to work against them into openings for intervention. Their efforts implore critical scholars of the environment and of global economies to take seriously the possibility that Big Ag’s increasingly frequent failures to reproduce itself are more than just minor inconveniences to business-as-usual. In this series of lectures, I trace the afterlives of the externalities that commodity production obscures, disguises, or otherwise erases from its ambit of accountability. In so doing, I offer an ethnographic model for turning the commodity studies model, inherited from generations of anthropologists, inside-out.
Rappaport lectures will take place on the following fall Fridays from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in 411 West Hall. They are free and open to the public.
Friday, Sept. 12
Elses and Externalities: The Un/Making of Plantation Capitalism
Friday, Oct. 10
Rejects: Food Cosmetic Standards and the Geopolitics of Waste
Friday, Nov. 14
Effluent: Living Downstream of Yourself on the Mindanao River
Friday, Dec. 5
Force Majeure: The See-Through Plantation
About the Speaker:
Alyssa Paredes is an environmental and economic anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of industrial agriculture, transnational supply chains, and social mobilization between the Southern Philippines and Japan. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Bananapocalypse: An Ethnography of the Commodity for the 21st Century, is under contract with the University of California Press. Additionally, her work appears in journals in anthropology, history, geography, food studies, and Asian studies. She is also co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food (University of Hawaii Press, 2025). She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.
To attend the event online, please register here.