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Affective Labor's ‘unruly edge’: The pagus of Carcelen's Solidarity &

Agroecology Fair in Ecuador

Article  in  Journal of Rural Studies · February 2018

DOI: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.02.001

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F
OO
ARective Labor's unruly edge : The pagus of Carcel n's Solidarity & Agroecology Fair in
Ecuador
Stephen G. Sherwooda⁠ ,⁠ ⁠ , Alberto Arceb⁠ , Myriam Paredesc⁠

PR
a
Knowledge, Technology and Innovation, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
b
Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
c
Desarrollo Rural Territorial, Facultad Latinamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Quito, Ecuador

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

D In rural studies, peasants are commonly characterized as part of a victimized class and product of the market,
leading to a rising battle of resistance against the avarice of a global capitalist system . An analytical preoccu-
pation with resistance, however, can conceal the relational dynamics involved in a people's day-to-day constitu-
tion of its multi-sited realities and territories -- a socio-political-material state of existence . Through empirical
TE
study of the everyday being and becoming in a peri-urban food fair, we explore the labor of Prst generation
rural-urban migrants, described here as the quasi-virtual-campesino , involved in forging a neighborhood in
Carcel n, a satellite city of northernmost Quito, Ecuador. Following a period of rapid professionalization and
integration into a modern commercial economy, denizens have organized around modes of activity that factor
into a responsible consumption campaign as a means of affect and to be affected. In the process, they have re-
activated the past, a mix of new possibilities around food diversiPcation, and formative interactions to enhance
EC

the singular situation of peri-urban existence. Despite apparent marginalization of the rural-urban migrant, we
Pnd the quasi-virtual-campesino in Carcel n capable of mobilizing affective labor through its creation of an un-
precedented Solidarity & Agroecology Fair. In terms of emergent forms, qualities, and overall residuality of the
neighborhood's food experiences and products, affective labor and (re)terriorialization are concomitant entities
involved in the constitution of a pagus or intersubjective, relational Peld of interacting socio-political-material ac-
tivity and open-ended resonance with peasant and ecological ideals. Ultimately, the Carcel n Fair exposes prob-
lems with the common depiction of the modern peasantry, in particular concerning neglect to the relationality
RR

found in people's practices, assemblages, and their intersubjectivities in and through food -- at what Anna Tsing
has described as the unruly edge of pericapitalism.

pressions and expectations of modernity. In this article, we explore the

1. Introduction: food at the rural-urban periphery emergent intersubjectivity and practices of a Prst generation urbanizing
CO

peasant actor that is not conceptually pure, but a product of miscegena-

The rural studies literature commonly assumes that deagrarianiza-
tion is the inevitable outcome of the social transformations tied to
economic development and globalization. It argues that urbanization
processes disconnect people from their land, farm and homestead. Re-
cent empirical studies in food, agriculture and social change in Latin
America (Sherwood et al., 2017), however, begin to show that this
UN
tion in and through modernizing, and sometimes seemingly incoherent,
rural-urban associations.
In order to explore this emergent, uncanny phenomenon, we have in-
troduced a methodological device: the polytope quasi-virtual-campesino.
Acting as both an individual and in collective, the quasi-virtual
campesino objectively and routinely labors for the autonomization of

is not necessarily the case. Substantially nuanced relationships among its existence in ways that can surpass the common boundaries of ge-
people, the environment and their things place into question highly ography. We emphasize virtual (i.e., the absence of strict definition or
instrumental geographic and dualistic economic characterizations. The simple characterization) as a means of respecting, but complement-
rural-urban migrant, for example, actively creates relational otherness ing contemporary accounts of the peasantry in rural sociology and
in the countryside, which can offer an opening for more radical and food studies, where dimensions of the rural and the urban are com-
creative contemporary livelihoods and more inclusive existences (Silva monly depicted as dichotomies in opposition. Here, we provide de-
et al., 2017). The establishment of peasant lands in the city, com- scriptive and analytical attention to the topology of a body in con-
monly arranged in the periphery of the urban complex, provides a stant semi-transition (i.e., the understanding that socio-material bod-
new site for the inevitable generation of multiple ex ies do not exist in natural form, but rather

Corresponding author.
Email addresses: stephen.sherwood@wur.nl (S.G. Sherwood); alberto.arce@wur.nl (A. Arce); mcparedes@Qacso.edu.ec (M. Paredes)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.02.001
Received 31 July 2017; Received in revised form 7 February 2018; Accepted 9 February 2018
Available online xxx
0743-0167/ © 2017.
S.G. Sherwood et al.
they are constitutive and therefore relational) and its highly mobile
topological interactions (how people, through force of social practice,
determine their associations and qualities of distinctiveness and con-
jointness) (Azarenko, 2012).
We view the modern rural-urban peasant's struggle for existence as
an intersubjectivity and transversal phenomena in relation to unfolding
events and objects -- e.g., the reproduction of particular products tied to
a weekly food fair. These subject-objects are partial annunciators of the
past, and today they have become at least partially detached from their
original wholes. Nevertheless, through an actor's ability to affect and be
affected as well as its sense of belonging, experience and multiple asso-
ciations with past and future foods-in-the-present, people come to sum-
mon these partial subjects-objects into visible corporealities, as can be
found and experienced in the narratives, discourses, practices and em-
bodiments that are tied to particular events.
From a relational perspective, a food fair is not merely a site of com-
mercial encounter, intermediation and exchange of goods and services.
It is a gathering or assemblage of partial objects-subjects as well as hu-
mans-nonhumans that, at any single moment, is in a dynamic state of
attachment and detachment with its community. In other words, a fair
is an event: a site of social creativity where people situate and territo-
rialize their abilities to affect and be affected. In so doing, they come
to craft certain socio-material conditions. We call this richly topologi-
cal space the pagus: a particular, if momentary intersubjective, relational
D
Peld of creativity found in people's activity and organization. A pagus is
where people's diverse and ever-actualizing socio-political-material as-
sociations generate the multiple forms of their existence.
Historically, the concept of peasantry has been used to distinguish
TE
between the rural and the urban space in Latin America. Nevertheless,
in its progressive geographical and social mobility, today researchers in
the social sciences and activists have tended to render an increasingly
vague image of the peasantry as: 1) a pre-capitalist state described in
contradiction with capitalist accumulation as well as a necessity of it,
2) a rural population subjected to external, dominant forces of exploita-
EC
tion, extorted through rent and a conceptual positioning that separates
them from things, and 3) the victim of commodity circulation, where
a population comes to represent the natural preserve for individuation
against processes of generalized commoditization (for explanation, see:
Edelman, 2013; Narotzky, 2016). The peasantry is generally summa-
rized as a class of people that organizes around non-commoditized prac-
RR
tices, lying outside the circulation of commodities and entrenched in
the organization of family. As per our empirical observations, we Pnd
this depiction as increasingly abstract, highly naturalized and based on
dated notions of the rural family. In particular, we raise concerns over
basing an understanding of the peasantry on an assumption that the
peasant's chief asset is the unique properties of its labor and potential
competitive advantage vis-a-vis modern wage labor and the market,
CO
while ignoring how this actor is able to break the grip of surviving rou-
tines and boredom by means of the opportunities it Pnds or forges for
improvisation, innovation and creativity. In our view, every situation
where the rural and the urban topologically interacts merits analytical
attention as a reinvention of the peasantry and its pagus of resistance
and existence.
Paradoxically, much literature today suggests that the agrarian fate
UN
of the peasantry is tied to the urban-based reQexive consumer that de-
mands healthy and environmental food (see for example, Edelman et
al., 2014). It is argued that the peasant increasingly has become incor-
porated into commercial markets, where the uncertainty and vulnera-
bilities of price, consumer demand, and the institutional control of the
national state and private business interests over production and com-
modity exchange compel competing interests -- be they agrarian, ur-
ban-based social movements or industrial -- to carve out a unique space
of ambiguity (Arce and Long, 2000) or, as alternatively described by
Appadurai (2000), as an expression of globalization from below . Simi-
larly, Tsing (2015) explores the space of social life at the out-of-the-way,
unruly edges of salvage accumulation -- essentially a location of con-
temporary topological interactions. For us, this is the relational Peld of
the quasi-virtual-campesino, where emergent human-nonhuman-object
associations constantly convert social and non-capitalist forms of value
into post-capitalist valuation, what Tsing (2015:viii) describes as the lo-
cation of ... what manages to live despite capitalism.
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
Carolan (2015) explains that some individualization in rural house-
holds and food communities has increased economic differentiation and
that the development of diversiPed livelihood strategies that combine,
for example, in farm and oR-farm work, are more-than-representa-
tional . Food knowledge is part of a value-laden association of practices
and composition of skills that lies central to the enactment of a food-
F
scape capable of establishing and maintaining personal relations and
functions across the expanse of rural and urban space. Some of these
practices are about drawing connections that bond city and countryside
OO
folks, generating expectations, struggles and alliances associated with
overcoming dilemmas of existence -- both within and beyond the gover-
nance of the market and the national state. Such practices amount to a
form of affective labor, i.e., everyday routines beyond wage activity and
its products. In this case, affective labor is born from a cosmopolitical
embodiment of food, neighborhood, exchange and value that, accord-
ing to a modernist logic of commoditization, can be mistaken for be-
PR
ing immaterial and unproductive.1⁠ In terms of consumption and repro-
duction, such non-commoditized work-based connectivities commonly
are viewed as divorced from productionist priorities. In part, this is be-
cause the value of affective laboring rests outside classical categoriza-
tions of the peasantry. Through means of affective laboring, we argue,
the quasi-virtual-campesino works for, against, negotiates or defers en-
counters with the market, the governance of state or expert institu-
tions, and changes in family norms, the landscape and material circum-
stances. In summary, a relational perspective reveals activity and per-
formances that effectively uproot classical and accepted academic cate-
gorizations of the peasantry, which in turn makes difPcult the descrip-
tion of agrarian processes involved in (re)production, such as the multi-
ple, multi-sited realities and territorial dynamics of agrarianization and
peasantization.
Our analytical interest in the quasi-virtual-campesino seeks to ex-
plain agrarian reproduction as an embodiment of singularities. The
methodological objective is to shed light on human subjectivity and in-
tersubjectivity as products of interobjective processes. This approach,
we argue, compels the observer to navigate the empirical obscurity of
the classical, though little questioned and increasingly reiPed constructs
of the peasantry. In particular, the research involves following the path-
ways of the social as an unfolding of associations that may involve ob-
jects, humans and nonhumans and where the quasi-virtual-campesino
lies center as a master pilot and performer. The sought after product is
a reconstruction of the topological, agrarian landscape as it transverses
one or more socio-material dimensions -- the urban, the market, the
family, the labor, the land-property, the form and content of cultivation
as well as the sale and procurement of food at multiple scales of ex-
change.
The modernization and transformations of the rural space in Latin
America and ensuing conQicts over food quality, distribution and access
present the need for a cultural and knowledge debate over the value of
affective labor in contemporary society. We Pnd that the worth of actors
lies in the labor, public service and the care experiences of the social
groups that occupy the rural and urban space (e.g., domestic laborers,
voluntaries, prostitutes, healthcare personnel, responsible farmers and
consumers, among others). The resulting practices and narratives in our
case study are a critical reminder of what has been lost with the demise
of the multifaceted and un-specialized small rural producer.
In short, following a century of agricultural modernization, we feel
behooved to question the contemporary separation and institutional
market-driven coordination of labor, which constitutes the basis for
the separation of production-consumption processes and the achieve-
ment of modern specialization and development in the rural-urban
space by means of social function, such as the
1 From the 15th century, the notion of peasant has been synonymous with a derogatory
representation of uncivilised dwellers, whose labor and sense of territorial belonging are
associated with precarious, archaic and pre-industrialism. Kearney (1996) argued that
the polybian characteristics of the migrant, understood as one who moved in and out
of multiple niches, and back and forth from peasant to proletarian life spaces during
its working life was a central characteristic of the peasant. In one context, the peasant
appears as a plantation worker and in another as a petty merchant or an urban slum
dweller. ...[T]hese slippery creatures defy constructed social bounds; they cross out their
proper places and enter into marginal spaces. And by populating these border areas, they
threaten normal social categories that the state has a responsibility to maintain (Kearney
1996:141-2).
S.G. Sherwood et al.
supply of food to cities. In our view, this orientation has concealed the
importance of the contemporary quasi-virtual-campesino and the affec-
tive labor involved in coping with the materialities of people's everyday
life, specifically in those spaces that are geographically or temporally in
between the topological dimensions of the countryside and the city.
Our topological orientation has taken us to study the experience of
Prst generation rural-urban migrants as a means of addressing abstract
and outdated portrayals of the peasantry -- in the case of Carcel n, a
group of dwellers bound by constraints of social marginalization and
political subjection. In particular, in this article we explore: how has a
network of people from a peri-urban neighborhood overcome, at least
partially, a subjected group status and repositioned itself as a subject
group.2⁠ This transversal experience is based on the work of the people
engaged in establishing a neighborhood Solidarity & Agroecology Fair3⁠
(heretofore the Fair ), effectively grounding political ecology in emer-
gent forms of responsible consumption and sustainable food . In ad-
dressing this question, we offer a reading that ampliPes accounts of the
social creativity and actions of the quasi-virtual-campesino as an actor
coalesced in the middle of emerging peri-capitalist social forms of liv-
ing, being and becoming in and through food.
2. Re-situating rural studies
2.1. Food as a site of living, being and becoming
D
In a provocative editorial in Rural Studies, Woods (2012) pointed
out that in recent time the scholarship has tended to focus on a number
of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts that raise ques-
TE
tions over the very notion of rurality as well as the demarcation of rural
studies. He called attention to how the territoriality of the rural space
is conceptualized, in particular with regard to how rural spatial and so-
cial relations are constituted, materialized, represented, and contested.
Citing the threefold model of rural space in Halfacree (2006), Woods
suggested a Qeshing out of the parameters of locality, for example, as
EC
inscribed by distinctive practices linked to processes of production and
consumption as well as to how rurality is formally represented, for ex-
ample, within notions of capitalism and policy in contrast to how every-
day life is experienced. Woods warned against the trap of attempting
to demarcate rurality based on a priori cultural or geographic character-
istics. In addition, he raised concerns over the arbitrary bifurcation of
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rural research between North and South as well as urban and rural, in
light of the intensiPcation of globalization processes that, he observed,
were materially and discursively forging a global countryside .
The academic literature and activist movements alike commonly
summarize peasant movements as involved in a Pght of resistance that
involves historically marginalized peoples (especially, the indigenous
CO
and smallholder farmers) against the avarice of global capitalism in in-
dustry, the state and science (see for example, Petras and Veltmeyer,
2011). While we do not doubt that this imagery represents a particular
experience of peasant movements, such resistance thinking is strongly
founded in a questionable understanding of social change as primarily
an issue of struggle against the occupation of formalized institutions.
The recent work of colleagues in Latin America has kindled our
UN
interest in people's existential territories, in particular with regard to
how rural actors organize and navigate the heterogeneous natures and
cultural processes of (non)commoditization in agriculture and food
(Sherwood et al., 2017). People, including peasants, are not just dis-
tributed across space; they come to occupy
2 A subject group is one that has the ability to make a political statement, as opposed to
having one's cause heard but without veriPcation of it (see F. Guattari, 1972).
3 Jacobs (2016) documented the appropriation and translation of the concepts of
agroecology and responsible consumption by actors involved in Ecuador's food
movements. For the organizers of the Carcel n Agroecology Fair, agroecology largely
refers to synthetic chemical-free, organic family-owned and -labored farming. Responsible
consumption is understood as direct food purchase or sale between consumers and
producers of organic/agroecological products as well as regular consumption of native
Andean foods.
3
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
and transform those spaces. A conceptual departure away from resis-
tance (but not its abandonment) implies attention to the relational
forces in the Peld of affects and material objects of reference, such as
food. Making sense of these hidden dynamics requires real-time study
of the entanglements of people engaged in the constitution of everyday
existence, which inevitably interconnects people, memories and objects.
F
An experimental and analytical framework demands fresh attention to
actor's intersubjectivities and their self-organized capacities in the rela-
tional Peld (i.e., the pagus). In particular, it demands attention to how
OO
groups become subjects and actors involved in the creation and occupa-
tion of space. In other words, regardless of whether existence implies an
element of resistance, greater attention is needed to how a researcher
observes people's practices, families and social networks, and how af-
fect, as a transversal objectal entity, emerges in the realm of relations
among humans, nonhumans and objects.
As summarized in Arce et al. (2015), social change in agriculture and
food is highly nuanced, contingent and dependent on people's encoun-
PR
ters and ability to forge new possibilities. The realities of food move-
ments in Latin America, as elsewhere, are increasingly cosmopolitical -
i.e., circumscribed not by gerrymandering or supply and demand, but
rather through effects, affects, and embodiments of vital materialisms --
a permanent creativity that is situated in the space where otherness is
organized as radical existence and as a continuous topological of gather-
ings and doings (Bennett, 2010). Similarly, activism is largely a socially
messy experience, where one's boundaries are not simply determined by
her or his gender, race, nationality, class or title. Instead, we Pnd that
such classical categorizations are precisely what is at stake, as people
ambitiously and creatively organize through unique practicalities, aspi-
rations and affects. In this case, for example, we examine the experi-
ences materialized in a food fair, where food production, processing and
commerce as well as its preparation and ingestion become a public and
political event, opening hitherto closed logics and hierarchies and al-
lowing actors to affectively interact and relate.
2.2. ABective labor
In The Human Condition, the German sociologist Hannah Arendt
(1958) argued that active and contemplated lives coexist and merit
equal treatment, leading her to distinguish among three categories of
the active life: action, work and labor. Accord to this perspective, ac-
tion, both deliberate and unintentional, is the means by which humans,
operating as individuals and in collectives, reveal themselves to one an-
other. She saw work as having a clear beginning and end, and it led to
the production, via the skillful use of tools and instruments, of a durable
object (such as a building or machine), rather than a consumable, such
as a particular food item. Arendt argued that work was a violent inter-
vention of nature, for example the conversion of a forest to wood for
building and a Peld for planting. Labor was understood as action taken
for the purpose of survival, such as in meeting one's biological needs
through the search for food, its ingestion and ensuing nourishment. Dif-
ferent than work, labor did not end with the generation of a product.
According to this work, the human condition demands that people end-
lessly re-produce labor, for example, in the daily pursuit of food. When
food is consumed, it then must be re-created -- not just for the survival
of the individual but also for the continuation of a neighborhood, a so-
cial network, and even a species.
Nevertheless, the social sciences have come to limit its treatment of
labor to productive wage-labor, tied to Marx's explanation of priva-
tized, industrialized means of production as coordinated, at least in con-
cept, by an interest in maximizing utility and profitability (Hardt, 1999).
Preoccupied with market-based extraction of surplus and accumulation,
this perspective prioritizes commoditized knowledge and technology as
well as marketability to the point where food studies potentially blinds
itself to other highly prevalent relationships involved in production, cir-
culation and consumption, in particular with regard to emotion and af-
fect.
The pioneering work of C.I. Mills (1951) presents a form of la-
bor that seeks to produce a certain emotional experience in people,
for example through service and care industries. Mills identiPed an
unprecedented product of post-
S.G. Sherwood et al.
industrial commodiPcation: the white collar labor tied to emergent of-
Pce work, teaching and sales that was not based on working with things,
but rather handling and manipulating symbols and clients a person-
ality market , where intimacy of an employee (and not just her or his
skill) became central to business and exchange. Hardt (1999) described
such emotion and affect as part of an increasingly inQuential form of
anti-capitalist, immaterial labor . He argued (p. 89), The productive
circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an au-
tonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the
processes of capitalist valuations. For Hardt, affective labor was central
in the production of collective subjectivities, sociality and ultimately so-
ciety itself.
In his assessment of modern capitalism, Hardt (1999) never left the
capitalist economy when describing affective labor. Instead, he argued
that affective labor had been effectively capitalized as one of the high-
est value-producing forms of post-industrial, post-Fordist labor tied to
the migration from industry to service jobs in the early 1970s. Dur-
ing this period, economic developments in highly capitalist countries,
in particular the United States, demanded new degrees of mobility as
well as Qexible skills associated with the intermediation between pro-
duction and the market by means of knowledge, information, commu-
nication and affect -- hence a production process built on the immate-
rial. Hardt explained that one side of immaterial labor was based on
activities of problem solving, problem-identiPcation and brokering. An-
D
other side was based on human contact and interaction or affective la-
bor, ranging in a hierarchy from fast-food servers to Pnancial service
providers -- all organized to provide a sense of feeling at ease, well-be-
ing, satisfaction and excitement.
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Drawing on feminist scholars, Hardt (1999) described another cat-
egory of affective labor based on labor in the bodily mode , such as
that enabled in mothering and care-giving. He explained that this af-
fective labor produced social networks, community, and, in borrowing
from Foucault, biopower -- understood as the potentiality of affect in
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the creation of life, the production of collective subjectivities, sociality
and even society. In this sense, Hardt pointed out that affective labor
was ontological (p.96): ... it reveals living labor constituting a form of
life Despite the enrichment of capital through greater intimacy with
human communication and organization, Hardt warned that human in-
teractions and relations had been instrumentalized around economic
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valuations and commodiPed, and thereby diminished and qualitatively
reduced. While affect existed prior to the arrival of post-industrial im-
material labor, this work sheds light on a worrisome subsumption of af-
fect to capital that has become part of the foundation of capitalist accu-
mulation and patriarchal order. Despite this limitation, Hardt concluded
(p.100), ... the production of affects, subjectivities, and forms of life
presents an enormous potential for autonomous circuits of valorization,
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and perhaps for liberation.
In a deepening critique of economic determinism, feminist scholars
have sought a distinction between productive labor and domestic labor,
in particular the work of women in the household and the family, such
as in cooking, cleaning, and care, which they describe as both reproduc-
tive and embodied (Vogel, 2013). The products and services of this pre-
carious, immaterial work are consumed directly and never reach a val-
UN
uation in commercial marketplace, thereby lying outside the intermedi-
ation of barter or currency exchange. In fact, Negri and Hardt (1999:
87) explain that value-affect is not just difPcult to measure, it is im-
measurable, in part because of its sublime creativity and potentiality. As
such, affective labor exposes a contradiction for capitalism as well as for
the academic Peld of political economy, which has sought to discipline
modes of life and exchange by means of capital, predictability and con-
vention.
Affective labor can refer to emotion and personality, but it also
can concern the constitutive effects of emotions in labor, in particular
the establishment of relations and relationships and their consequences.
Weeks (2007) argues that affective labor is part of a pre-capital, pre-in-
dustrial process of coming to be or subjectivization that may occur for
the purposes of earning a wage, but more often than not, the emotions
in affective labor are a form of socially necessary coordination of labor
the very means of social reproduction and organization that establishes
and sustains the everyday effects of cooperation and civility. Weeks
concludes that affect traverses the divisions of mind and body, reason
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
and emotion, and it confounds the ontological containment such di-
chotomies permit and enable.
2.3. Pericapitalisms
Meanwhile, Anna Tsing's (2015: 63) empirical work on the survival
F
of the matsutake mushroom sheds fresh light on the contemporary ex-
istential spaces or the shadows of capitalist destruction . She describes
the unpredictability of modern industrial life as not merely capitalist or
OO
pre-capitalist, but rather peri-capitalist -- i.e., taking place at the Qux
of the entangled seams or rough edges of capitalist penetration, do-
mestication and order. Immersion in the space of the mushrooms, or as
in our case the food fair, does not remove a group or a person from
the global empire of capital, class or regulation. Instead, she views en-
gagement at the cracks as a place to begin to understand the emergence
of the matsutake mushroom and its realm of associations as an exam-
PR
ple of precariousness, in particular in reference to its (p.3) willingness
to emerge in a blasted landscape that allows us to explore the ruins,
which for her signiPes a site of not just survival, but also creativity, Qair,
and even the production of a new commons.
In the place of a preoccupation over a hopeless domination due to
globalizing capitalism, Tsing (2015: 158) Pnds endless socio-biologi-
cal and -material contamination by relational encounters that change
people and things as they make way for one another. She explains, this
relational object-subject can give way to an assemblage, understood as
a performance of livability , of which the matsutake mushroom is a
contingent moment or singularity -- an inherently sporadic fold that de-
Pes scale and absolute predictability and hence definition. Nonetheless,
the presence and proliferation of the matsutake mushroom -- the out-
come of a interspecies, socio-material-political co-creation -- cannot be
denied. The existence of the matsutake mushroom -- or, as we posit, a
rural-urban neighborhood food fair -- located at the end of the world
necessarily lies at what Tsing describes as the highly contingent, unruly
edge of Qux, relationality and hope.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) dePne a body as a sensorial, affective
and intensive set of associations that necessarily work both within and
across a spectrum of scales, including a single organ and a human body
as well as an institution of politics and law. As such, a body is not merely
biological, material or social but simultaneously each. Assembled bod-
ies are both different and interdependent, and they both dePne and are
dePned by circumstance. In this study of a pericapitalist rural-urban
food fair, we adopt the view that food is part of an endless process of
socio-political-material embodiment that is held together and enabled
through people's feelings, practices and performances. We summarize
this material vitality or corporeality as a folding back on labor and exis-
tence. We argue that the unfolding multiplicity of existence found in an
assembled body underlies the potential of people to overcome the ab-
stract and distracting, if not blinding, imaginary that a desired future is
largely a question of Pxing the institutions of science, the state and the
market.
The conceptual position of this article is that through affective labor
an actor, as individual or group, gives birth, intentionally or not, to an
actuality and ultimately to a particular actualized existence, such as the
Carcel n Fair. In addition, we argue that labor and its actualities can-
not be fully determined, any more than the emergence of a particular
resistance or existence is predictable. Nor can the potential of affective
laboring be deduced from its market value antecedent moment (e.g., the
selling of peasant labor to a capitalistic endeavor), because the circuit
that encompasses each is simultaneously actual and virtual (the reacti-
vation of the germinal stirrings of a past into new events). In this way,
affective labor effectively expands the creative force of labor, thereby
transforming into a vital materiality that permanently lies outside an in-
strumental toolbox.
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (1972) introduced deterri-
torialization to explain the highly Quid, dissipated schizophrenia (i.e.,
not the disease, but rather the absolutely free, unleashed Qow of de-
sire) of people's subjectivity in modern-day capitalism and subsequent
socio-political and -material embedding and disembedding. The au-
thors are careful to explain that desire is inevitably expressed through
social codes and institutions, even if these are fun
S.G. Sherwood et al.
damentally variable and contingent and therefore subject to change.
Deleuze and Guattari explain that deterritorialization arrives by means
of a vanishing line or line of Qight , understood as the way in which
an actor's energy and its assemblages are withdrawn, voluntarily or oth-
erwise, from a particular territory before settling into or moving on to
affectively labor another location.
Meanwhile, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) go
on to distinguish between relative and absolute deterritorialization. Rel-
ative deterritorialization involves a re-territorialization in which actors
re-embed themselves in an earlier or evolving context. They return to
the concept of line-of-Qight to explain the existence of a rhizome -- an
image or thought that is devoid of clear chronology, organization, struc-
ture or hierarchy and thus planar and trans-species. They explain that
a rhizome is highly nomadic in propagation and growth, and that the
process of deterritorialization gives way to a multiplicity of new rela-
tional forces and relations that may transcend existence or even imag-
inable or knowable geo-historical trajectory. Accordingly, absolute de-
territorialization involves a plane of immanence , in which actors es-
tablish new social, political and material boundaries to their existence.
Borrowing from the aforementioned works of Tsing (2015) and Deleuze
and Guattari (1972, 1987), in this article we posit that by means of de/
re-territorialization the socio-political-material space of pericapitalisms
is constituted and extended.
3. Methodology
D
This study does not address what food relations should be, but rather
it seeks to describe and analyze what food relations are. This critical ap-
TE
proach necessarily prioritizes people's everyday realities with agricul-
ture and food, as experienced in their homes and on the streets. In so
doing, it emphasizes that social change in food and agriculture is not
easily guided or designed by state, science or the market, but rather it is
fundamentally nuanced, contingent and unpredictable.
Understanding development in food as a socio-political-material ex-
EC
perience, we examine how food relationships are embodied through a
multiplicity of processes, effects and affects associated with the advent
of a specialized food fair. As explained in Arce (2015), an embodied
approach to food studies demands study of people's reality as it unfolds.
Therefore, it requires highly empirical research that necessarily takes
into account relationships as they are encountered and felt. In so doing,
RR
the approach attempts to collapse a priori representations of human ex-
perience and social organization.
The research reported here is based on real-time, ethnographic study
of the day-to-day beings and becomings of families involved in Car-
cel n's weekly neighborhood Solidarity & Agroecology Fair. We learned
about this experience through involvement in Ecuador's lively Colec-
CO
tivo Agroecologico (known as the Colectivo), an informal collection of
some 400 individuals and collectives dedicated to nonviolent agricul-
ture and food, and the Movimiento de Econom a Social y Solidaria en
Ecuador (MESSE), a network of largely urban-based activists engaged in
food circulation, creative marketing, barter and the use of alternative
currency.4⁠ As a result of the success of the weekly Solidarity and Agroe-
cology Fair, the members or feriantes from Carcel n have become inQu-
UN
ential actors in the national and regional activities of both the Colectivo
and MESSE. As activist-scholars, Paredes and Sherwood have been in-
volved in both the Colectivo and MESSE since their respective inception
in 2005 and 2006, but neither has been directly involved in the Carcel n
Fair.
Carcel n is a parish and satellite city, located in the north of Quito,
the Capital of Ecuador. The neighborhood is largely made up of Prst
generation migrants who today occupy households situated within an
area of 25 square blocks. At this site, we have found an urban-rural
alliance involved in opening up new forms of autonomy tied to eco-
nomic need as well as passion and adventure. While a collection of
students recently has begun to document and
4 For further information on the evolution and social dynamics of the Colectivo and
MESSE as alternative food movements, see Sherwood et al. (2013); Arce et al. (2015) as
well as the MSc thesis of Ongeval (2012), Jacobs (2016) and Kok (2017). One can follow
the activity of these movments via their joint QueRicoEs! campaign: www.quericoes.org.
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
study the Fair,5⁠ in this article we rely on original Peldwork led by Pare-
des in March and April 2017. Based on ethnographic methods, Paredes
carried out participant observation of three weekly food fairs as well as
home visits of nine participating households (both rural and urban) and
ethnographic interviews with twelve inQuential feriantes, as identiPed
through snowball sampling. As per the request of the informants, we
F
have changed names to provide anonymity.
4. Carcelén and the Solidarity & Agroecology Fair
OO
4.1. Resettlement of an hacienda
Located in the northernmost region of Quito and popularly known
as The New North , Ecuador's military dictatorship in the 1970s con-
ceived the Parish of Carcel n as an affordable housing project and satel-
lite city. The project was intended to alleviate the demands of growing
PR
numbers of rural-urban migrants, in part due to Ecuador's oil boom and
consequent road-building initiatives. The military dictatorship handed
over a sector of the expansive La Delicia Hacienda, owned by the fam-
ily of Mariana Carcel n, the daughter of the Prst mayor of Quito, Felipe
Carcel n, and the wife of the Venezuelan born Greater Liberator of
Gran Colombia during the 19th Century, Jose Antonio de Sucre.
With the support of the Ecuadorian Housing Bank, Carcel n was de-
signed around eight super blocks of a total of 2800 houses, labeled A
to H, including plans for a large park, public schools, hospitals, and
markets. The affordable housing project was ofPcially completed and
handed over by President Jaime Rold s in 1981, which was one of his
Pnal acts prior to his tragic death by airplane crash in the southern
Province of Loja. The late Jaime Rold s continues to be highly revered
among Calderon's inhabitants.
Today, Carcel n is composed of the originally planned sector of Car-
cel n Alto, made up of largely lower to middle class homes belonging
to manual laborers, public employees and small business owners. The
poorer sector of Carcel n Bajo largely contains industrial warehouses
and factories as well as nuclei of resource poor homes of more recent,
marginal migrants. Located in this area is the Hospital San Francisco de
Quito, the Colegio Americano de Quito joint primary-high school, the Insti-
tuto Superior Amazonas teachers college, and the Interprovincial Bus Ter-
minal, which connects the country's northern provinces with the capital.
In addition, Carcel n is the site of the training facilities for Ecuador's
popular football club, Deportivo Quito. In 2012, the Parish of Carcel n
had a population of 51,301 inhabitants.
4.2. The Solidarity & Agroecology Fair
In 2010, actors involved in the Colectivo and MESSE embarked on an
open-ended campaign to call attention to an agenda for radical transfor-
mation towards food sovereignty , generally understood as a democ-
ratization of food production, procurement and consumption processes,
summarized as food for the people, of the people, by the people
(Ongeval, 2012; Jacobs, 2016). Following a critical assessment of Pve
years into the government's food sovereignty legislation, in 2014 peo-
ple connected with these social movements ambitiously proposed to by-
pass the state and recruit their own constituent public: a critical mass
of Pve percent of Ecuadorian households to a self-determined and -or-
ganized call for responsible consumption. In concept, the Campaign is
open to the people who eat -- be they urban or rural, rich or poor,
mestizo or indigenous, and it is loosely led through self-initiative and
democratic appropriation. Proponents of the Campaign include people
from all classes and creeds, such as the indigenous, mestizo and for-
eign-born as well as housewives, school children, farmers, urban food-
ies, chefs, and development practitioners working in every province of
Ecuador (Jacobs, 2016).
While consumption generally is understood as the moment when
something is procured, for the Campaign responsible consumption is
an endlessly ambitious, vague and highly contestable concept (Jacobs,
2016). For some, respon
5 See for example, the recently completed MSc thesis of Kok (2017).
S.G. Sherwood et al.
sible consumption may emphasize direct or non-currency barter, locally
produced food, organic or agroecological production or the use of tra-
ditional Andean crops and gastronomy. Understanding its objective as
identifying and linking people around common or complementary prac-
tice, rather than seeking consensus, the Colectivo and MESSE have been
strategic in keeping the Campaign conceptually open and subject to Qa-
vor, taste, and debate . To shed light on the rich dynamics of social
change in the homes and on the streets of the otherwise marginalized
and constrained rural-urban migrant, we examine the experience of Car-
cel n's neighborhood Solidarity & Agroecology Fair a weekly event
that neighborhood leaders conceived in 2008 but that did not fully ma-
terialize until 2014. Based on Paredes aforementioned ethnographic
Peldwork, we go on to present her Prst-person accounts.
4.3. A day at the fair
It is 6 a.m. in the morning, and Patricio, one of my students in
Rural Territorial Development, and I [Paredes] arrive at the Solidarity
& Agroecology Fair. We turn up at the Community Police Unit and
a large parking lot, which are located at the entryway to the Fair and
where Eliza, a community communication volunteer from the QueRi-
coEs! Campaign, is waiting for us. Eliza has offered to introduce me to
the feriantes and to show us around. Despite the early hour, half of the
D
parking lot is dotted with large plastic canopy tents. So far, about 40
growers -- most of them women from surrounding villages, with many
accompanied by their young daughters and sons -- have materialized.
The sun is yet to set, and the fair already feels like a party. The
TE
women arrive in their own truck or via hired transport; they wear pon-
chos, jackets, hats and scarves because it is cool and damp at this early
hour in the morning. While vendors raise tents and set out their goods,
they engage in lively conversation with their neighbors.
Several panels of wood are placed on metal sawhorses to form
makeshift tables. Each vendor covers her or his table with the same col-
EC
orful blanket of red and orange, where they set out an assorted array of
vegetables, Andean roots and tubers, and tropical fruits as well as home-
made goods for sale, such as soaps and shampoos. At other tents, I spot
colada morada (a traditional drink made from fruits, spices and black
corn Qour and served warm), assorted breads and cakes, chaguarmishqui
(a fermented drink made from the agave plant), jams and honey. In one
RR
corner an elderly indigenous woman is roasting a half-dozen guinea pigs
-- each strung on a carrousel of iron spits spun over a bed of burning,
smoking embers. A few years ago, I took part in a fair as a grower, when
I visited some 15 fairs in the country. Two unique aspects strike me
about this particular fair: the high number of feriantes and the diversity
of products that they have brought from across the different ecological
CO
regions of Ecuador.
By 6:30 a.m., before our contact Eliza has shown up, a gaggle of
clients arrive. Patricio and I pitch in to help out a vendor who we
have met. Since we have not yet had breakfast, we buy something to
eat: freshly squeezed orange juice, warm maize tortillas and coffee. The
early clients clearly know where they are going; they divide up and head
over to a booth of particular interest. One woman asks, Do you have
UN
my strawberries? The vender reaches into a box under the table and
produces a paper bag full of dazzlingly red fruit, and she hands it over.
More and more people arrive and approach the same stand. We real-
ize that they have come to pick up their order from the previous week.
Not only are the strawberries unusually fresh, but since strawberry in
Ecuador is reputed to be heavily soaked in pesticides during production,
I hear a client comment about the rarity of pesticide-free strawberries.
Over the next half-hour, an increasing number of people material-
ize, and a crowd forms. Most are elderly women in their sixties; many
are donned in sweat suits and equipped with a wicker basket or plas-
tic bags. I follow a woman as she arrives to a table containing piles
of exotic fruits and vegetables. She picks up and studies an unusual
round burgundy fruit, while asking, What is this, mommy? The ven-
dor responds, It is a passion fruit from the West [of Ecuador] -- very
rich and fragrant. Instead of ten fruits, I'll give you a dozen, so that
you can try it. The client responds, Wow! I don't know if I have ever
6
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
seen a red passion fruit. I'll take the dozen. She accepts a bagful of fruit
and hands over a dollar bill.
A number of fruits and vegetables that are sold in the Carcel n Fair
cannot be found elsewhere in Quito -- not even in high-end supermar-
kets. In another stand, I hear three people who have come together in
comment over a nopal. In another stand I Pnd people talking about the
F
traditional Andean roots mashua and jicama. I am particularly interested
in one stand run by a family from Ambuqui that contain a variety of
hard-to-Pnd pulses: multi-colored and -sized varieties of dry bean, broad
OO
bean, pea, chickpea, cowpea, pigeon pea, lentil and lupin. The grower
is proud to explain the details of how each is uniquely suited to the
semiarid region of the highlands, land that produces its own unique Qa-
vor. I am impressed to see the agility of a group of women that is busy
at shelling a large pile of Peld bean, while holding a lively conversa-
tion. Looking around the market, I see a half-dozen groups doing the
same, but oddly, I don't spot a single man taking part. Instead, the men
PR
are busy delivering sacks to stands and holding their own conversations
with passers by.
By 8:00 a.m., clouds of people Qoat in and hover about the fair. At
the corner closest to the parking lot, three young people raise a large,
white plastic tent and set out an inviting array of stools. In front of the
tent they set up a whiteboard that advertises the latest news of the Fair:
This week we have free-range chickens for sale! When I inquire about
what they are up to, a young man replies, We've set up this site so
that the neighbors can sit down with their children and baskets to re-
lax, while they are waiting for a vehicle to pick up them." He introduces
himself as Sebasti n. He is 25 years old, and I discover, cofounder of the
neighborhood Solidarity & Agroecology Fair.
Sebasti n studies communication at a local university. He is pleasant,
but also he is skeptical about my intentions. I explain that our research
is not associated with the Ministry of Agriculture or the Municipality of
Quito and that we are part of the QueRicoEs! Campaign. Eliza arrives
to conPrm my claim. Sebastian introduces us to Lucia, from the grow-
ers association. She's lively and clearly a leader. She's brought along her
adolescent son, Fabian, who takes over her stall, while Lucia visits other
vendors to follow-up on sundry bits of business.
At 12 o'clock, towards the end of the Fair, I discover a group of ven-
dors that has gathered to barter its unsold goods among one another.
One woman exchanges a handful of Spanish onion for naranjilla (a strin-
gent, orange-colored solanaceous fruit used to make juice). A half-hour
later, the vendors slowly begin to collect their unsold bits. The feri-
antes are at different stages of folding up their tablecloths and taking
down their tables and tents, before loading up everything into assorted
pick-up trucks and vans for return to their respective village.
4.4. Public space and conAict
At the end of the Fair, I Pnd a group of women that are busy pruning
the overgrown grass that surrounds the parking lot, before stuRing the
grass into large sacks to take home for feeding their animals. Sebastian
approaches me to explain, For us, this is a shared space. But, we have
not yet been able to agree with the municipality that this, indeed, is a
common public space." As we talk, a police car arrives to the parking
lot. The ofPcer turns on his siren, before turning around and withdraw-
ing from the scene. Sebastian continues, This is just one of the prob-
lems that we have with the local institutions. One would assume that the
community and its members were the ones who controlled the [public]
shared space, and that they were the ones to decide when the authori-
ties should, or should not, come here.
Contrary to my expectations, the neighborhood is not lead by the
elderly members of the community, but rather by a new generation
of youth, such as Sebastian. For the original inhabitants, dreaming a
bit further has priority always over Pnding shelter and basic services.
Today's generation has become interested in demanding basic rights.
The neighborhood is one of eight mega-blocks that make up Carcel n,
with each block containing about 400 houses. The Ecuadorian Housing
Bank established the neighborhood for the workers from a large gov-
ernment-Pnanced, road-building project. The vast majority of the bene-
Pciaries came from rural villages belonging to other parts of the coun
S.G. Sherwood et al.
try. According to Sebasti n, the colonists did their best to educate the
children. Meanwhile, a conservative administration came into power,
which stoked fear against any sort of community-based organization for
the youth. As a result, an entire generation of kids entered modern met-
ropolitan life educated by a culture of going to the shopping center and
not in being part of a neighborhood or a community. Marcela, a mem-
ber from the Neighborhood Council, shares her opinion:
"The inQuence of the visual culture of the West, so present in
the Quito of the 1980s, began to change your way of behaving,
and all problems became tied to race: mestizaje... Back then, you
wanted to be white, but even if you tried, you would not be able
to be. Instead, you started to generate other habits, other forms
of socioeconomic living. In the 1990s, [the supermarket] Super-
maxi took over, and the people began to organize around another
type of consumption and new forms of prestige. Many people say,
The Supermaxi of Carcel n is the most beautiful thing that there
is in the north of Quito!
Of course, people started to believe in the glamour of a collection
of shops and a supermarket under one single roof. The shopping
mall is constantly trying to seduce you, but ultimately we are An-
dean; these shopping centers do not represent your interests; they
are not designed for us. A shopping center is an expensive place.
These shopping precincts are places where you get very little, and
17, 2017]. D
everything you buy is foreign or transgenic. [Fieldnotes, March
According to Marcela, a key indicator of the loss of belonging to the
TE
community in Carcel n is the rising rates of divorce in the second gen-
eration of its inhabitants. For many in the neighborhood, correcting this
social decay has become a driving purpose:
"When we Prst established our organization, we started mobiliz-
ing a local youth that was steeped and involved in the commu-
EC
nity The earlier leadership worked with a different population.
We are no longer the post-modern of the Mariscal [a business dis-
trict that caters to foreigners]. Here we are [now] people of terri-
tory. We have worked with different purposes to link up [neigh-
bors] around the purposes of a better coexistence. [Today] our
organizational principle is based on the [historic rural Andean
RR
tradition of the] minga [or collective work party]. We have ques-
tioned why there is so much insecurity -- not just insecurity that
someone would rob you , but the fear that people have in sim-
ply meeting others, in particular the wealthy or those from other
countries.
Beginning in 2010, the neighborhood committee took over con-
CO
trol of the communal house, [which is] located at the center of
the neighborhood, as a means of appropriating [the neighbor-
hood] public spaces and encouraging neighbors to get to know
one another. This was a means of reconstituting the social and
economic fabric of our neighborhood. [March 17, 2017]
As Sebastian points out, the emergence of a neighborhood organiza-
tion involved a reconnection with the original migrants, now the grand-
UN
parents, and their places of origin. This includes organized community
visits and the rescue of traditional celebrations:
"The grandparents -- from [rural] communities and reared in the
countryside -- started to recall [their rural experiences], after we
introduced the use of [Andean] ceremonies to open up events.
They said, I did that as a child. My mother did that I have not
done that for years It's really good that you bring that [to our
community]. [Meanwhile] other neighbors arrived [to meetings]
rejecting their origins: Ah, that's just for Indians.
Nevertheless this acknowledgement to previous life experiences
began to win out. Already, we are about to host our eighth
festival of Quitu Samay -- the festival of resistance against the
colonial celebrations of Quito. And the neighbors already un-
derstand this logic. From the be
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
ginning, we said, Ours are not colonial festivals; these are not
festivals of the [Spanish] foundation of Quito. Ours is a cry for
life, for the people of this territory that is known as [the Andean]
Quitu. If you start to raise this strong, clear idea from the be-
ginning, the ensuing festivals grow out of the momentum of new
adherents to remembering who we are. (Fieldnotes, March 17,
F
2017)
At the center of the strategies to link the community through a cul-
OO
ture of rural affects lies both the nostalgia for certain foods and concern
for the arrival of new diseases tied to modern food and living, in par-
ticular with regard to diabetes and heart disease associated with the re-
cent advent of overweight/obesity. With the objective of renewing tra-
ditional culture, in 2014 the Neighborhood Council proposed the estab-
lishment of an open-air neighborhood produce market. This led to an
alliance with a group of organic, agroecological growers and an invi-
tation to organize a weekly food and products fair in the neighborhood.
PR
Sebasti n explains the original logic behind this activity:
"We were worried because these neighbors already have children,
and these children buy processed, canned products, and they are
beginning to have serious health problems. [In response], the
parents have started to go to the greengrocers a lot. Carcel n is
full of vegetable stands, and you have two large greengrocers in
this area. On the other side, you have three, and then you have
the super-vegetable stores that are beginning to look and act like
Supermaxi. They have begun to raise prices, and the neighbors
already are getting together to talk about it.
Daniela [an agronomist from the neighborhood and member of
the Council] met with our new partners to iron-out the details.
This led to a certain form of solidarity exchange, [to] something
more than a market...
[Our fair] is not the same kind of market that people call a plaza
[in reference to the wholesale market]. That market is also the
municipality space made up of maPas -- where there are Pghts
over insecurity, where there are Pghts over drug trafPcking.
That is their place of commercial activity. For us, our community
square is another sort of territory. This fair has become an expe-
rience in how to learn a new social and political positioning for
the neighborhood The fair has started to generate some insti-
tutional linkages, especially with MESSE [the Ecuadorian Move-
ment of Social and Economic Solidarity]. With our fair, we have
demonstrated that a community also can do well under its own
cultural and social initiatives, and [we have] demands [that are]
different from those that people have known in their previous po-
litical and institutional lives. (Fieldnotes, Neighborhood Council
Meeting, March 24, 2017).
Through this process, the Fair provides the possibility of working di-
rectly with rural families that are willing to offer their products in the
largest parking lot of Carcel n each Friday. Lucia, from the growers as-
sociation, explains:
"The Fair was inaugurated on the 14th of June At Prst, it [the
fair] was every 15 days. They advertised it by periphony, and
then the word spread from mouth to mouth. Quite soon we were
asked to hold the fair every week. While in other places, the mu-
nicipality has evicted the organizers from public places, here we
own our space to sell our products. This is because people have
experience in struggling to consolidate our community and pub-
lic spaces. This fair is not built on municipality space. Here we
are not merely participants; we are exercising our citizenship."
Lucia points out that the organizers of the fair had brought together
growers from different locations. She explains, The idea is that the pro-
ducers come from towns of different altitudes, so that the products of
the fair are varied and special. Today, we have produce from Cangahua,
Pimampiro, Otavalo, Pacto and parts of Cotacachi."
The Carcel n fair has been held every Friday for almost three years,
during which it has faced multiple challenges in continuing its oper-
ation, but Lucia emphasizes that the greatest challenges come from
the community members
S.G. Sherwood et al.
themselves. Staying open for the public demands the management and
sometimes-aggressive appropriation of public space as well as special at-
tention to different sectors of the community, in particular the elderly
and youth, who have very different interests and needs.
A follow up visit to Carcel n reveals that the fair is part of a series
of neighborhood activities that are designed to recover lost values from
they very villages that once hosted these migrant people. Sebastian ex-
plains how the fair navegates traditional and modern memories and af-
fects:
"We wondered how you organize this from inside [the neighbor-
hood] and also from the outside -- the link with the contempo-
rary world of the West, where one prioritizes being modern and
fashionable. The grandparents attend [the fair and meetings] to
socialize. The market is a social meeting place... People like to
come and meet their neighbors; they even come to the market to
argue [about their problems]. The youth and older people gen-
erate their own dynamic. For example, in my house we are Pve
brothers. On Friday night each has to pick-up his purchase [from
my mother's house]. Then, as per what's most fashionable [for
the youthful professional generation in Quito], they also must go
to Supermaxi...
[Nevertheless,] most elders cannot answer, what is an 'agroeco-
logical' thing? Even many farmers also do not understand, be-
D
cause for everyone in this fair, agroecology is the normal way of
producing. It is not a word that even exists in Kichwa [language].
Among the participants, the ofPcial name of our market is the
'Solidarity & Agroecological Fair' because we go beyond mere or-
TE
ganic production
Yes, we are better than even Supermaxi. Maybe the products will
not last the same, but it is because they [the products in our fair]
are natural and have ten times the nutritional value [of products
sold in the supermarket], so the neighbors come for that. In ad-
EC
dition, there are exotic fruits that people remember from their
childhood and that only can be found here. The sellers here are
not sellers or intermediaries; they are the farmers themselves."
(Fieldnotes, March 17, 2017)
In order to more fully connect people in the neighborhood with the
vendors in the Fair, the neighborhood has sent multiple groups to visits
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the vendor's farms and communities. Lucia, from the Growers Associa-
tion, clariPes that this is part of their Participatory Guarantee System
-- a joint vendor-purchaser certiPcation scheme. Marcia, a resident of
the neighborhood, explains:
"The Fair is very beautiful because there is also a component
of consumers who accompany and follow the producers in their
CO
Pelds. We visit our partners [the growers] every month with
large groups of 40 [from the community]. The event has the
name allín ruway [Kichwa for doing well ]. We have used
Kichwa because we want to generate more connection between
the consumers and the growers. For those people who are curious
but still have that racist mindset, you will think twice about go-
ing, because you will be confronted by the stories of the people
UN
in the villages
Lucia adds, They take part [in the participatory certiPcation sys-
tem] not only to see what we produce, but to see how we cultivate. They
also want to see how we live as well as to become friends -- not just with
us, but with their past. For Lucia, the Carcel n fair is the best organized
fair because, unlike the fair in Ibarra and Otavalo where the organizers
have had to Pght for their sales space, in Carcel n they are invited and
given all the conditions to be able to operate. In her opinion, both the
residents of Carcel n and the vendors have the same problems with lo-
cal government: it seeks to own and control what people want to do in
their own neighborhood.
In contrast to the commercialization projects that have originated
from the municipal government, people in the neighborhood refer to the
Solidarity & Agroecology Fair as an example of a creative economy .
According to Sebastian:
8
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
"Supermaxi [a nationwide chain] and all of its providers could
be all-organic, but still they would end up exploiting peasants
As people started to show interest in buying organic [produce],
ConQuito [a Quito City project] and the Municipality arrived to
set up their own fair in competition. Their markets are based
on a logic of [state-based and expert] paternalism and depen-
F
dence. And above all, [their projects are] designed to attract elec-
toral votes... Meanwhile, some of the people in our neighborhood
were beginning to grow their own crops at their homes. This was
OO
great, but it was too expensive to keep doing this, and these gar-
den crops were not always organic. So, confronted by this situa-
tion, we decided to establish another form of a fresh market, and
we became aware of a series of other alternatives, including Fair
Trade.
We started with setting up our own food fair, Prst, by respecting
and recognizing farmer's labor of care, and second, we decided
PR
to pay a fair price for their produce, as a means of nurturing and
supporting an affective and professional means of food distribu-
tion. Peasants are professionals. They may not have a formal de-
gree, but they are capable at what they do. They have inside of
themselves a particular vocation and lifestyle. We started to meet
[other] people who were doing the same, and we discovered that
there were food fairs as far away as [the Province of] Loja. Some
have existed for hundreds of years, and they did not need state
support to be set up and to become established.
This was an important reality check, and it led us to start a di-
alogue with a number of local organizations, and Pnally, it led
to the idea that farmers should come to sell their products here...
We eliminated the middlemen, which was a long aspiration for
us. We wanted to contribute to the generation of better living
conditions in our ancestor's villages, so rural youth would not
have to migrate to the city [in search of a decent living], because
[migration] involves moving away from a relatively stable life to
become part of a difPcult, marginal and precarious existence at
the border of a city.
In food stands the middleman seeks to exploit his brother, to ex-
ploit his father, to exploit his mother, and they sell wares at ten
times their value. They are no longer a neighborhood vegetable
stand. They become a supermarket. Here we have two. They are
organized on a logic of exploiting their own family, their neigh-
bors and their community. We are very critical about those sorts
of food outlets. We consider that the whole sociocultural devel-
opment of a society has certain aspects and sense [of fairness].
Forms of exploitation in food do not just belong to the world of
the West; they also belong to the worlds that are linked to the
West. All worlds are in need of renegotiation, so that we can
transform unequal access to food.
Instead, we want it [the fair] to work with all growers. We want
to understand their values, and how they feel about food among
themselves. We want it to be able to offer better food products to
the public. Today, we are talking that the fair is part of the cre-
ative economies , and this is an important addition to the agroe-
cological ideas about the world. Here, we have a popular and
strong fair to exchange food, also oral traditions, and this is a fea-
ture that is especially appreciated among the people of the Andes.
We know they are even open to [non-currency] barter exchange."
(Fieldnotes, March 17, 2017)
Sebastian continues:
"The point of all of this is that this territory has had a lot of
conQicts. It appears in the property title of the residents that
apart from their homes, they have access to a community space
and that space is the communal house and parking space. Be-
fore the parking lot was a soccer Peld, there was a mess. We
said if this is a parking lot, then let's paint the lines ourselves
[pointing to the yellow lines of the parking lot] that brought
us a legal conQict with the municipality. But well ... the com
S.G. Sherwood et al. Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx

munity was regulating... that is a logic of appropriation that al-
lowed us to commandeer space for the fair.
The fair began in the central park, and the transfer of the produce
every Friday was terrible. We had to get [Municipal] permits [be-
cause the park is from the municipality and not from the commu-
nity], so we thought we'd do the Feria down in the parking lot,
In terms of mode of provision, this process of de/recommodiPcation
involved a transition from food as a product of market- or state-based
provision to more direct and intimate family-level and neighborhood
provision. This means of access still enabled a family to meet its caloric
requirements, but instead of having to accept the Pxed terms of the su-
permarket, it did so while generating new values and meanings through

F
endless negotiations over price, quantity and quality and even identity,
where with all the history there, they [the ofPcials] would not
such as through the advent of Peldtrips to the past on the farm and
bother us. If they came , they'd have to think twice, because
in the village. Thereby, food as a transitional object provided cultural
they already know who they are going to have to talk to."

During one of the meetings of the Neighborhood Council, a member
from the assembly demanded greater transparency from their represen-
tatives, in particular with regard to potential conQicts of interest and in-
volvement in political parties:
"There is an article on the internet that says 'do not defend a
state, make a neighborhood', because the state does as it wishes
OO
and social returns not commonly available through more commercial or
state-led modes of market-based provision.
The Carcel n fair involved new consumer involvement and commit-
ment to food doings (practical activity, such as the logistics of deliver-
ing products and setting up and managing the market stalls) and sayings
(representations of practical activity in the Neighborhood Council, and
the ability to defend a position vis-a-vis the technicians and authorities

PR
at the municipality). Neighbors and their farmer acquaintances became
and you cannot protest, since the government is so far away from
involved in the coordinated nexus of common knowledge and under-
the people. In the neighborhood you are close to the people, so
standing over, for example, products of interest and the terms of trade
you have two possibilities: you are accountable to them, or you
as well as their distribution. They took part in the creation of explicit
must leave the neighborhood. Here, you generate affects and a
rules and instructions or procedures over such matters as expectations
different type of control arises. Here, within this neighbor-
of diversity as well as norms of presentation, quality and price.
hood, there are three main principles: the Prst, there is no pro-po-
Participants also erected certain teleoaffective conjectures, leading
litical party partisanship; the second is that we do not make re-
them to become engaged in beliefs over quality as well as emotions and
ligious proclamations. You can believe what you want. And the

D
third is that we expect a constructive criticism and some sort of
proposal. If there is no proposed solution, [the criticism] has no
value." (Fieldnotes, March 17, 2017)
moods over the past and present of their lives, Andean foods and cui-
sine. The weekly reproduction of the Carcel n Fair involved continual
coordination and competent enactments. As such, the Fair became both
routine (i.e., a recognizable product) and creative (e.g., each event was
TE
an original encounter and performance). In that sense, the participants
5. Discussion: beyond the wage
were social carriers of certain knowledge, but a knowledge that was
not solely the quality of an individual, but also the quality of a certain
While initiated through a deliberate, government-led project to bring
practice -- an emergent experience and tradition. Because the nexus of
labor into a growing urban center, today we Pnd that Carcel n is not
the fair depended on continual performance for its recognition and sur-
limited to its original concept, physical organization or designs of the
vival, the weekly practice was not merely historical or actual, nor was
EC

military dictatorship in the 1970s or even the intentions of the pre-

it simply the product of the growers or the consumers or the product
sent-day Municipality of Quito and the wage-based economy. The Soli-
of the rules of the Neighborhood Council. The Fair was simultaneously
darity & Agroecology Fair is largely the product of a creative, cosmopo-
past-present, rural-urban and individual-social.
litical encounter -- a highly experiential, contingent and unpredictable
A neighborhood leader, housewife, farmer or cashier at a bank in
process situated in the (re)production of daily labor in and through
Carcel n may share the basic understanding of how to reproduce indi-
food.
vidual dispersed practices, but he or she did so in a broader teleoaffec-
RR

Rather than limiting themselves to existing production and procure-

tive re-ordering in this case as part of a publicly recognized position,
ment markets, people in Carcel n are in the process of diversely appro-
job or career. Hence, affects were tied to social practice in the sense
priating and transforming their food relationships into an emergent pub-
that they simultaneously occured in different situations and at differ-
lic good that effectively shakes up the ofPcialized expectations of mod-
ent points in time. Affects were labored into existence through different
ern food: reliance on relatively impersonal, commoditized products, ex-
body-minds interactions. Competing adherents, such as the ConQuito
pert-based production and intermediated procurement in a well-lit, sani-
technicans, municipal ofPcials, and the police, were within each teleoaf-
tized supermarket. Sebastian (the aforementioned cofounder of the Fair)
CO

fective reordering -- with different degrees of commitment to sustaining

explained, Our priority is here: in the intimacy of the Agroecology Fair,
or changing performance standards and the reorganization of practice.
not the anonymity of Supermaxi [the supermarket] We are extend-
While the neighborhood participants in the fair were eagerly involved
ing the possibilities of the wage to relations of solidarity; we are build- in building community , the particular actors tied to the formal institu-
ing neighborhood... In Carcel n, we found that the (re)constitution of
tions were actively involved in enforcing deterritorialized and ofPcially
neighborhood has involved highly pragmatic, intensive, week-by-week recognized norms and standards of modernization (e.g., those govern-
affective labor that revitalized at least three socio-political processes: ing production, hygiene and price). In so doing, they became agents in-
de/recommodiPcation, relational encounters, and the materialization of
UN

volved in reeling in the reterritorialization of the Solidarity & Agroecol-

alliances and embodiments. ogy Fair.

5.1. Processes of de/recommodi@cation 5.2. Relational encounters

Central to the Carcel n Fair experience was the process of de/recom-
modiPcation that, as explained by the stall owners as well as peo-
ple taking part in the Neighborhood Council, was not simply focused
on maximizing utility (i.e., consuming less, better or more efPciently),
but rather it was about consuming differently. Sebastian explained that
rather than merely procuring anonymous food from an unknown ven-
dor, the participants sought allín ruray (Kichwa for well-being ) as a
means of intensifying the connections and relationships among involved
parties -- both human and nonhuman.
Ultimately, the experience in Carcel n illustrates that the practice
involved in de/reterritorialization of a neighborhood is fundamentally
non-instrumentalist. Socio-political-material assemblages and
line-of-Qight are not the product of a natural ordering of things, al-
though such associations do not take place in complete chaos. As such,
making sense of territorialization in food required understanding of:
1) routines involved in coordinating the (re)production of relationships
(e.g., those generated during processes of production, sale and procure-
ment) and 2) the affect, embodiment and desire involved in continu-
ally re-inventing the food fair, for example, by posting familiar sights,
smells, and sounds at one's weekly table or stall.

9
S.G. Sherwood et al.
The encounters and conQicts found at the Fair were not just between
public and private interests. They were between people and the author-
ity they had bequeathed to formal institutions be it the state, sci-
ence or the market to manage the public good, as embodied in dif-
ferent forms of food knowledge, territory and exchange. In the process,
the participants were not just in danger of losing their representation
and recognition in society. They also were at risk of losing control over
their food territory. Cultural images and objects of food and the market,
such as the nostalgia over the past of their grandparents or notions of
agroecology and responsible consumption, were constituted and objecti-
Ped through the inter-determinacy and Qux of cultural life. In this way,
lived experience and culture, emergent through the interplay of actors,
knowledge and sites in and through the Fair, became the focus of bodily
being-in-the-world and the generation of new synergies.
In the study of Silva et al. (2017) of wheat assemblages associated
with Qour for bread production and artisanal hat-making in Bio-Bio,
Chile, the authors shed light on the intersubjective processes involved in
the intensive (re)production of landscape, territory, care, and the pub-
lic as a seamless territorial assemblage. In particular, the authors show
how local varieties of wheat have properties, which in an alliance of
practice between people and the organic nonhuman entities of a region,
are capable of liberating new potentialities. Similarly, through the hu-
man-nonhuman intersubjectivity found in food, in Carcel n people's cre-
ativity became available as an emergent asset -- not just to the indi-
D
vidual and her or his social network, but also to the nonhuman other
(e.g., the supermarket, the individual stall and the neighborhood as well
as the different products therein), thereby generating new associations
among individuality, the social, the self and the other.
TE
Through the relationality of affective labor, people in Carcel n were
able to renew a sense of self and collectivity in and through the mater-
ial, social and political processes involved in (re)creating the composite
processes and products of food production, circulation and procurement
-- values that they had lost through the assembled commodiPcations
EC
and associated dependencies of modernization. Similar to the case of
Bio-Bio, the Agroecology Fair in Carcel n engendered relationships that
did not just respond to the biological need for a service of caloric provi-
sion, but it also generated new social-political-material value in convert-
ing food to a public good tied to the immediacy of food security as well
as interests of cultural expression, health, environmental sustainability
and a sense of neighborhood and community. In so doing, the Fair came
RR
to be a line-of-Qight from the commoditization of the market -- an in-
stance of deterritorialization.
5.3. Emergent alliances and embodiments
In Carcel n new relationships and alliances were forged at the in-
CO
terface where entities -- real (e.g., the food actualities, as expressed in
people's bodies, economies and the environments) and imagined (pro-
posals of agroecology, food sovereignty and responsible consumption) --
(re)constructed and dismantled themselves in a pagus of co-constitution
of linguistic, quotidian practices, corporeal individualities and collectiv-
ities. While certain cases cite the dangers of people handing themselves
over to the transcendence of science, the state or the market (e.g., by in-
UN
discriminately accepting the recommendations of the technicians from
ConQuito or the sirens of the police ofPcers who arrived to disrupt the
feria or going back to the temptation of the supermarket), at the mo-
ment of our Peldwork, Carcel n appeared to be involved in processes of
absolute territorialization by means of its own immanent embodiments
and multiplicities, including new food norms and standards that did not
necessarily obey the boundaries of the genetics of indigeneity, the eco-
nomics of class or the scientiPc standards of best practice .
The experience in Carcel n reveals that alternatives to modern food
is not simply a matter of understanding, representation, and author-
ship, but also they are a part of highly unpredictable and even inex-
plicable processes of sensibility, leading to formation, invention, and
fabrication as well as accident. In connecting aspects of corporeal-
ity, affect and reQexivity, the processes of embodiment in the Fair
demonstrate how the knowledge and technology involved in food pro-
duction, procurement and exchange are capable of both creating and
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
breaking through classical categories, such as those used to separate
rural from urban, peasant from professional, poor from rich, and citizen
from state.
The Carcel n Solidarity & Agroecology Fair reQects a cosmopolitical-
ization of food and agriculture that is reQexive to rising rates of mobil-
ity, Quidity, and interdependence between work and the expressions of
F
agricultural goods. In part, this rich dynamic and its constitutions are
due to the emergence of highly intensiPed experiences of people, acting
as consumers in search of the original Qavor and taste sensations of the
OO
familiar as well as the exotic, leading to all sorts of expected and unex-
pected outcomes, including antagonisms from institutional authorities
and neighborly goodwill, generosity, charity, and peace. These experi-
ences illustrate that agricultural practices are not necessarily a part of
a market, nor do they necessarily organize and operate in line with the
natural state of a territory, government, expert institutions, society or
culture.
PR
6. Conclusion: a+ective labor's unruly edge
This Special Edition of Rural Studies raises questions over the ac-
tualities of agrarianization and peasantization in light of the prolifera-
tion of globalization in agriculture and food. In response, we have pre-
sented the experience of Carcel n's Solidarity & Agroecology Fair at the
rural-urban periphery. We raised a central question tied to territorial-
ization: how has the seemingly marginalized rural-urban migrant topol-
ogy, working from below in households and on the streets, mobilized
affective labor and other socio-political-material relationships to enable
the establishment of a weekly alternative food event, thereby unfolding
agroecology and responsible consumption as new political, peri-capital-
ist social forms?
6.1. Pragmatic existence
It remains to be seen whether the experience of the Carcel n Fair
will survive as a unique assemblage vis- -vis the normative pressures of
the municipality and its ConQuito project, eager to reel in and re-terri-
torialize alterntive movements, but according to the people we met in
homes and on the streets, the organizers are no longer as preoccupied
as previously by a battle of resistance against the state. In reference to
the Fair's occupation of the community parking lot as well as its man-
agement and administration, both Lucia and Sebastian emphasized that
the vendors and purchasers no longer sought permission from authori-
ties. Instead, the feriantes increasingly felt that they were in charge of
self-regulation. We observed people involved in new, increasingly prag-
matic, autonomous modes of existence around food that appeared to be
taking socio-material-political hold. Despite the continued presence of
the anonymous modern market, the constituents of the Fair had opened
up spaces of maneuverability in their neighborhood, thereby escaping,
to varying degrees, the tight binds of subjection in industrial food.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987:9) have described the commercial mar-
ket as a messy assemblage of people and products, smells, colors and
taste composed of ceaselessly established connections between semi-
otic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the
arts, sciences, and social struggles. Perhaps the most salient insight
from Carcel n was that the potentialities of the market were not limited
to the present-day choices, but rather the creativity and effectiveness of
the participants in soldiering a peri-urban frontier. The ongoing experi-
ences and organizations reveal how actor's fears, hopes and expectations
were held together through the encounter of cultural worlds, divergent
objects and practice, which once provided a degree of familiarity and
autonomy, but also dependence on a topological existence between the
rural and urban, place and space. Today, we Pnd in Carcel n arrays of
pericapitalist associations -- the products of differential responses to de-
and re-territorializing conditions of the rural and other multiple moder-
nities.
As in the case of the utilization of public spaces as well as the
many foods and other products that ultimately energized the weekly
arrival of the feriantes and their clients, the potential of the Fair as
an assemblage was bound to the vibrant interactions and alliances
with objects and human-nonhuman matters of local interest, such as
those generated by the exotic Qavors of the unusual fruits that we dis-
S.G. Sherwood et al.
ative affects capable of connecting people to a certain, if sometimes
idealized Andean characterization, the Solidarity & Agroecology Fair
became a pragmatic territorialization in peri-urban Carcel n and, one
could argue, broader Quito.
For us, the Fair illustrates that social change is less about @ghting
against an essentially abstract and unknowable global industrial food
system , than it is about @ghting for highly practical and deeply imma-
nent interests, such as desired ways of planting, selling, procuring, cook-
ing, eating or celebrating. As a result, we've come to view forms of exis-
tence as a horizon previous to resistance, where socio-political-material
being and becoming is interwoven with social life.
6.2. Resonance from below
As Sebastian summarized when describing how the elderly, against
all expectations, were able to recruit urban youth into the Solidarity &
Agroecology Fair, We [in the neighborhood] are only bound by our de-
sire and imagination. People in Carcel n have not always followed the
original pathways of development for the rural peasant or even the mod-
ernizing urban peasant. For example, they have not always followed the
prescribed route for occupying the satellite city or, more recently, in or-
ganizing a commercial market according to the expectations of munici-
pal authorities and the technicians at ConQuito.
D
While it is widely argued that food globalization only can be over-
come through state-based regulation, we Pnd a substantial gap between
the abstract discourses on food sovereignty and the notion of an ex-
cluded people merely eking out an existence in some remote territory
TE
or marginal urban setting. Our principal preoccupation with the politi-
cally correct and transcendental analysis common in the peasant stud-
ies literature rests in a question over what nation-state policies come to
mean in practice, when key institutional actors in the state, but also in
social movements and global forums, distance themselves from people's
(re)territorialization of food-based health practices, trade, labor and en-
EC
vironmental management.
The image of social movements as chieQy reactionary or defensive
does not give justice to the emotion, fear, uncertainty and inspiration
that peasants and other activist communities undergo while moving
among affective processes involved in and through food. The experi-
ences in Carcel n illustrate that the speciPc rhizomatic reach of modern-
RR
ization in is not eternal or universal. Modern food is merely temporarily
stabilized as a particular object-human-nonhuman assemblage or multi-
plicity. Through the Fair, the quasi-virtual-campesino was able to spawn
new resonances through its pursuit of responsible consumption, effec-
tively unleashing inQuential relational forces found in food and people.
As cited earlier in this article, Woods (2012) argues that social sci-
ence must not lose sight of what is relevant and significant for people
CO
to reconstruct society. While non-wage, immaterial, affective labor com-
monly is undervalued or even neglected in studies of modern-day rural-
ity and its transformations, in many ways the energy generated through
the Solidarity & Agroecology Fair reveals the quasi-virtual-campesino's
transformative potential in creating space and values for continuity and
change.
UN
6.3. Peasantry at the edge
Rural-urban migration in Carcel n calls attention to the forces of se-
duction that lured peasants into a world in constant movement, more
often than not, to sell her or his land and labor as means to gaining
greater access to their existence. In this brief exploration of the inter-
subjectivity of food and the relationship with the urbanizing quasi-vir-
tual-campesino, we return to the socio-biological and -material cont-
amination of Tsing's (2015) matsutake mushrooms at the end of the
world. In and through unpredictable, if not inexplicable, processes of
food production-procurement-circulation as well as in the subtleties
of Qavor and taste found at the weekly Fair, the emergent rural-ur-
ban quasi-virtual-campesino dePes easy categorization. We are left with
the fact that many of these actors, provided their position in the so-
ciety and work expe
11
Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2018) xxx-xxx
riences, do not have more lucrative options in the labor market and in
the Peld of civic engagement.
By cashing out human attributes, the quasi-virtual-campesino, op-
erating at the peri-urban margins of Quito, has become an important,
if largely imperceptible part of the material and economic weavings
of contemporary capitalism, the circulation of things and processes of
F
commoditization. While the tendencies of globalization may represent
serious and even overpowering constraints for some, they are by no
means permanent or insurmountable conditions for others. In Carcel n
OO
we found a group of actors that had come together over an alternative,
if seemingly unrealistic aspiration: to escape the social relationships of
close association to the net morphological unit of the family farm and
the rural community, thereby breaking with the predictability of the so-
cial and making free use of their affects to embrace modernity, in its
many forms, possibilities and potentials.
The objectivity- and intersubjectivity-scapes through which the
quasi-virtual-campesino arrived to sharpen and make use of the 'unruly
PR
edge' was a dense assemblage of people, non-humans and objects that
constitute a socio-material dynamic capable of cultivating engagements
and generating political resonance. Eventually, it provided the energy
through which new capacity to act was vitalized, thereby sparking the
constitution of the pericapital.
When the dynamics and engagements hold sufPcient potential, a
spanning cluster of relationships might arise to form new, more intensi-
Ped existences capable of fresh activity as well protecting experiences of
labor and affects. In addition, as we have seen with the connections be-
tween the Carcel n Fair and broader networks, such as MESSE and the
Collectivo, labor and affect can leap between neighboring sites, thereby
generating new topological associations, where objects might couple or
randomly place experiences and experiments inside a normal process
of commoditization or institutional market regulation.
For the quasi-virtual-campesino, the experience of rurality,
land-based living, food, market, and neighborhood is not one of stable
substance or being. Instead, we Pnd each involved in an always-differ-
entiating process of becoming -- an origami cosmos of relationships, for-
ever folding, unfolding and refolding. The affective labor that gave birth
to the Carcel n Solidarity & Agroecological Fair presents the arrival of
new, freshly delineated and objectiPed life-worlds, including a variety
of cultures, natures and other resonances that reveal a highly Quid fron-
tier of contemporary actors and objects. The quasi-virtual-campesino
and its kin-family relationships do not simply become transplanted, nor
do they disappear with urbanization. Rather, through tremendous labor
of affect, rural life continues, if endlessly transforming and distributing
across, but not merely subjected to, the unruly edge of peri-capitalist
bureaucracy/state, knowledge/science and market/industry.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data related to this article can be found at https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.02.001.
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