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This lecture is part of the COLLOQUIUM SERIES OF THE INSTITUTE OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Fungi, bacterial and viral diseases, invasive pests, and unpredictable weather events have affected banana production across the globe. Today, the world’s most beloved fruit is threatened by extinction. This lecture addresses the predicament of dealing with beings on the cusp of extinction based on a case from Uganda, where I have done long-term fieldwork with plant scientists and farmers. I first trace ways in which local bananas have long become entangled with colonial and capitalist dynamics by following the arrival and management of the banana weevil, a devasting banana pest from Southeast Asia. Dealing with this and other colonial-capitalist legacies is at the heart of contemporary international biotechnological conservation efforts that seek to enable the plant to survive in challenging environments. In the second part of my lecture, I focus on tech-driven, gene editing efforts that operate with survival temporalities and tackle apocalyptic scenarios on the molecular level. I outline the strange paradoxes in science between planetary imaginaries of future extinction and ever miniscule levels of technoscientific intervention. I show how scientific framings make addressing larger systemic issues driving species extinction unthinkable, but at the same time also allow conceiving of vegetal vitality in productive ways. Thinking alongside these scientific propositions about reproduction and vegetal capacity allows envisioning the impending “bananapocalypse” differently and cuts across rigid North Atlantic separations between life and death.

Recommended readings:

Question of science in the global south: Calkins, S. (2023). Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres of Southern Science. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 48(2), 243-271. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211055118

Extinction related: van Dooren, T. (2022). In Search of Lost Snails: Storying Unknown Extinctions. Environmental Humanities, 14 (1,) 89–109. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9481451

© Sandra Calkins

Image note:  Science in action on a GM-banana field trial near Kampala (S. Calkins)