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Introduction
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops,

Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in
Argentina
Pablo Lapegna
Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780190215132
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215132.001.0001
Introduction
GM Crops, Global Ethnography, and the Dynamics of
Demobilization
Pablo Lapegna
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215132.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter introduces the broad questions tackled by the
book: What challenges do subordinate groups face when
seeking to address environmental problems threatening their
health and livelihoods? How do subordinate groups resist, but
also negotiate and accommodate environmental threats and
economic marginalization? The first section situates GM crops
in the global context, focusing the expansion of agribusiness
and the neoliberal globalization of the 1990s. The second
section presents concepts of space and scale to discuss the
global reach and localized manifestations of GM crops and
their socioenvironmental impacts. The third section discusses
the literature on social movements, processes of
demobilization, and patronage politics. The fourth section
explains why a global ethnography approach is best suited to
analyze the social processes addressed by the book and
complement the insights of the literature on food regimes.
Page 1 of 39
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College; date: 16 February 2019
Introduction
Keywords: genetically modified crops, neoliberal globalization, neoliberal food

regime, global ethnography, space and scale, social movements, demobilization,
patronage politics
In February 2003, Nélida woke up on her small farm early as

usual and went outside to feed her chickens.1 Nélida lives in
Monte Azul, a rural community in the province of Formosa, in
northern Argentina. That morning she noticed that her
manioc, corn, and vegetables were all completely withered.
The day before, farmworkers had been spraying
agrochemicals on a large nearby field of genetically modified
(GM) soybeans. Carried by the wind, the agrochemicals had
spread to the smaller neighboring farms, affecting Nélida and
at least two dozen other peasant families.2 This agrochemical
drift destroyed the cotton that the peasants were about to
harvest and withered the vegetables they sold at a local
farmers market and used to feed their families. The damage
was not isolated to the crops, but also affected the health of
the surrounding community. Locals, and especially children,
developed headaches, muscular pains, nausea, vomiting,
breathing problems, skin rashes, and unusual pimples.
In the ensuing months, peasants reacted to this environmental

damage by organizing some of the most disruptive and visible
protests in the recent history of Formosa. In Monte Azul the
affected families, many of them members of the grassroots
organization MoCaFor (the Peasant Movement of Formosa,
Movimiento Campesino de Formosa), organized several
roadblocks and filed suits against agribusinessmen,
demanding reparation for damages to their farms. The
protests soon spread to other parts of the province. In Moreno,
another stronghold of MoCaFor, peasants and local inhabitants
seized a crop duster (the airplane used to spray (p.2)
agrochemicals) and occupied the local airport for a week. They
did not leave until they were reassured that the fumigations
would cease.
Page 2 of 39
Introduction
Fast-forward six years, to February 2009, when Nélida awoke

to find an unsettling landscape: most of her chickens were
dead or walking around the yard erratically. Throughout
Monte Azul, nearly 100 chickens were dead and people
(especially children) were again suffering from skin irritations
and respiratory ailments, caused by another agrochemical
drift. In Moreno, while aerial fumigations ceased after the
2003 protests, people continued suffering from agrochemical
exposure and related health problems. Yet in 2009, unlike the
response in 2003, no protests took place in either of these
communities. Two points in time, two comparable problems of
agrochemical exposure, and yet the same people reacted very
differently: with intensive, disruptive protests in 2003, and
with no collective action in 2009. Why, when facing
environmental damage, do people from the same communities
first react by organizing contentious protests and later fail to
engage in collective action?
In this book, I scrutinize these events to tackle two issues:

first, to analyze the social and environmental consequences of
GM herbicide-resistant crops; and second, to understand the
politics of demobilization in contemporary Argentina. Paying
attention to subjective, organizational, and political dynamics,
I analyze how peasants move from contention to
accommodation, reconstructing the impacts of social
movement alliances and evaluating the effects of authorities’
responses (which change from dismissal to recognition). In
short, this book is about the sweeping expansion of GM crops
in Argentina, cases of agrochemical exposure, and processes
of popular mobilization and demobilization as they open
windows to agrarian, environmental, and political debates.
Page 3 of 39
Introduction
Why should we be concerned about GM crops and the fate of

peasants and small farmers? What can we learn from the
skyrocketing expansion of GM crops in Argentina and from an
analysis of processes of demobilization? First, GM herbicide-
resistant crops perpetuate an agricultural production centered
on monoculture and agrochemical use. As such, they represent
a hazard for populations exposed to agrochemicals and
contribute to the economic concentration of agricultural
production. This book shows that the widespread use of GM
herbicide-resistant crops may create serious problems of
agrochemical exposure and inhibit forms of production carried
out by small farmers and peasants. Argentina, in short,
provides critical lessons on the deleterious consequences of a
massive experiment in transgenic monoculture and its
negative socioenvironmental impacts.
(p.3) The findings presented in this book apply to soybeans

that were genetically modified to resist a specific herbicide
and not necessarily to all transgenic crops (although I also
briefly discuss the adoption of GM herbicide-resistant cotton).
Although there is much discussion around the potential
impacts of GM crops in general, whether positive or negative,
analyzing Argentina and zooming in on specific rural
communities allow us to inspect some of the actual effects of
transgenic agriculture.
Second, by studying processes of demobilization, we can have

a more comprehensive understanding of contentious politics,
integrating concepts that explain the emergence of collective
action with those that explain the waning of contention. I
argue that the study of the ebb and flow of contention in the
context of GM crop expansion offers lessons on how
subordinate actors (in this case, peasants and the rural poor)
think, feel, and act about socioenvironmental changes, and on
how they resist but also negotiate and accommodate negative
socioenvironmental impacts.
GM Crops as Global Project
Page 4 of 39
Introduction
The 1987 footage shows four men wearing suits and white lab
coats, standing inside a greenhouse filled with plants. The
intermittent clicking and flashes of photographers registering
the event punctuate their conversation. “We have before the
USDA right now a request to test this for the first time at a
farm in Illinois this year,” says one of the men to another who
is listening attentively, arms crossed in front of the coat
embroidered with his name and position: “Vice President
George Bush.” The vice president was touring a Monsanto
Company research facility, and the executives and scientists
were eager to test a genetically engineered soybean designed
to resist the herbicide produced by the company. “And I will
say quite frankly, we have no complaint about the way the
USDA is handling it,” continues the Monsanto executive.
“They’re going through an orderly process; they’re making
sure as they deal with these new things they do it properly …”
After an awkward pause, the executive clarified: “If we’re
[still] waitin’ until September and we don’t have our
authorization, we may say something different!” When
chuckles subside, the Vice President Bush offers a word of
comfort: “Call me. We’re in the ‘de-reg’ business.”3
Those “new things” that the executive referred to were seeds

genetically engineered to resist Monsanto’s herbicide,
Roundup, and while Monsanto was initiating the biotech
business, the government was promoting the de-reg (p.4)
business. By 1993, George Bush had gone on to become
president of the United States and as part of his regulatory
relief initiative the federal government authorized the release
of biotechnology products into the environment. “The United
States is already the world leader in biotechnology. And, we
want to keep it that way. [The biotechnology industry] should
reach at least 50 billion dollars by the year 2000, as long as we
resist the spread of unnecessary regulation,” said Bush’s vice
president, Dan Quayle, when he announced the new policy. In
1994, the first GM food was offered in the US market.4 In
1996, GM herbicide-resistant soybean seeds were sold in the
United States, unleashing the commercialization of other GM
seeds and launching a profound transformation of agriculture
around the world.
Page 5 of 39
Introduction
Genetically modified seeds were created in the 1990s, but are

also a descendant of the “green revolution” in agriculture.
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, philanthropic organizations
(e.g., the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations) partnered with
public institutions to support research and development
initiatives to create hybrid seeds, crossing different varieties
of plants and producing new varieties of maize, cotton, and
wheat in Mexico, India, China, Pakistan, and the Philippines
(Ross 2003). This process of technological diffusion known as
the agricultural green revolution had at its core a
“technological package” of hybrid seeds, agrochemicals
(fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides), and machinery (to sow,
fumigate, and harvest the crops) designed to increase crop
yields. The hybrid seeds of the green revolution and
genetically engineered varieties, however, result from
contrasting social processes and are different seeds. Hybrids
are obtained from crossing different strands of plants while
genetically engineered varieties result from recombining the
DNA of plants with DNA of viruses and bacteria. Socially,
whereas the green revolution was fueled by public–private
partnerships, the “gene revolution” is overwhelmingly funded
and controlled by corporations (Patel 2012, Pingali and Raney
2005, Kloppenburg 2005).
At least four salient features of transgenics allow us to identify

them as global crops. First, transgenics are transforming
agricultural production in diverse parts of the world. Second,
they are created, patented, and commercialized by global
corporations. Third, they have been adopted on the heels of
the neoliberal globalization that spanned the globe in the
1990s. Finally, transnational social movements and NGOs have
been resisting and opposing GM crops, mirroring their global
diffusion (McMichael 2009, Heller 2013, Newell 2008, Otero
2012, Pechlaner 2012, Schurman and Munro 2010, Scoones
2008).
Page 6 of 39
Introduction
(p.5) In the United States, GM crops have expanded rapidly

since 1996. In 2011 they represented nearly 90% of soybeans
cultivated in the United States, in addition to more than 80%
of maize, and more than 75% of cotton (Lang 2013). In
contrast, the production of GM crops in Europe is still
restricted as a result of concerns raised by food scandals
(most noticeably, “mad cow” disease), the adamant
mobilization of environmental and farmers’ organizations, and
backlash to the aggressive marketing strategy implemented by
Monsanto when trying to introduce GM seeds on the continent
(Heller 2013, Schurman and Munro 2010). In so-called
developing countries, the approval of GM seeds followed the
track of the green revolution and found elective affinities with
countries adopting neoliberalization policies. Argentina
approved GM soybeans in 1996, China and India approved GM
cotton in 1997 and 2002, and South Africa approved GM corn
in 2001. By 2011, eleven countries accounted for more than
98% of the 170 million hectares planted with GM crops: the
United States, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, India, China,
Paraguay, South Africa, Pakistan, Uruguay, and Bolivia, in
decreasing area (James 2012). Despite this global expansion,
83% of the world area planted with GM crops was
concentrated in just four countries (the United States, Brazil,
Argentina, and Canada).
Page 7 of 39
Introduction
In South America, the diffusion of GM crops intersected with

processes of neoliberal globalization, which facilitated the
increasing operation and control of agribusiness corporations
over agriculture. In December 2003, Syngenta Company, one
of the six biggest global biotech corporations, published a
curious advertisement in an Argentine national newspaper.
Next to the slogan “Soybeans Have No Frontiers,” the ad
showed a map of South America and a green patch covering
most of Uruguay, northern Argentina, eastern Bolivia,
southern Brazil, and all of Paraguay, with the words “United
Republic of Soybeans” at its center (see Figure I.1). The ad
prompted the reaction of anti-GM activists, since at that time
transgenic soybeans were only legal in Argentina and Uruguay
(Bravo 2010, Manzur et al. 2011). Transgenic seeds were
smuggled from Argentina and illegally planted in Paraguay
and southern Brazil in the late 1990s. Farmer associations and
agribusiness lobbyists used the de facto situation of thousands
of hectares planted with GM crops to pressure states and
national governments, ultimately gaining approval for growing
and commercializing GM crops.5
Ultimately, the United Republic of Soybeans ad proved to be

premonitory: Paraguay officially authorized the production of
GM soybeans in 2004, and Brazil and Bolivia in 2005. By 2011,
GM crops in South America (mostly soybeans but also corn
and cotton) had been sown across more than 66 million (p.6)
hectares, representing close to 40% of the global GM crop
area (a landmass comparable to the states of California and
Oregon combined). Argentina and Brazil are clearly the
biggest GM crops growers in Latin America, with almost 24
and more than 36 million hectares of GM crops sown in 2011,
respectively (James 2012). Argentine and Brazilian
agribusiness have played a key role in the growth of
transgenic production in Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia
(Bravo 2010, Galeano 2012).
Page 8 of 39
Introduction
During this
period of
global
expansion,
GM seeds
developed
two
intertwined
lives. In one
life they are a
product, a
seed
genetically
engineered to
express a trait
that simplifies
agricultural
production.
Contrary to
popular
belief, GM Figure I.1 United Republic of Soybeans
seeds do not
necessarily
result in higher yields and fall short of solving the problem of
agrochemical use.6 The most widely sold GM seeds (p.7)
(soybeans, maize, canola, and cotton) are engineered to
tolerate herbicides or eliminate insects, thus making
production more standard and simpler to manage. Soybeans
and canola were genetically engineered to resist Roundup (a
glyphosate-based herbicide produced by Monsanto Company)
and corn and cotton to produce a toxin that kills pests. In their
life as seeds, GM crops are sown, grown, and harvested. But
GM crops also have another life, expressed in the imagination,
discourses, ideas, and projects of businessmen, policymakers,
activists, scientists, scholars, and consumers. In this second
life, GM crops elicit polarized views of aggressive promotion
and entrenched opposition. As crops intertwined with projects
and discourses, transgenics have incited both praise and
condemnation throughout the world, receiving similar doses of
enthusiastic adoption, critical appraisal, and adamant
rejection.
Page 9 of 39
Introduction
The promotion of GM crops grew through a cross pollination

of discursive themes that are highly problematic from a
sociological perspective but are nonetheless deeply rooted
among policymakers and the general public. I argue that
technophile, productivist, Malthusian, and moral narratives
are weaved into a highly influential “techno-productivist”
discursive formation.7 First, a technophile discourse taps into
the ingrained idea of technology as a neutral tool; in the case
of agriculture, a disembedded biotechnology is assumed to
have the same results independently of the social context
(Kinchy 2012, Levidow 1998, McAfee 2003).8 Second, this idea
is reinforced when combined with a productivist frame, that is,
the unexamined assumption that agricultural production has
to progressively increase yields.9 Third, a neo-Malthusian
narrative reinforces these technophile and productivist views,
arguing that there is a pressing need to increase agricultural
production in order to keep up with population growth (Ross
2003). Insufficient access to food is construed as a supply
problem that can be solved by a “technological fix” (Goodman
and Redclift 1991: 142), thus excluding “the complex political,
social and economic dimensions of the question of access to
food in favour of the simplified notion of ‘feeding the world’ as
a global project” (Brooks 2005: 367). The corollary of this
techno-productivist discursive formation is a legitimizing
moral imperative, presenting GM crops as a “pro-poor”
technology that fulfills missions of corporate social
responsibility (Glover 2007, 2010a, 2010b). This techno-
productivist discursive formation is not entirely new but rather
an extension of the ideas supporting the so-called green
revolution (Patel 2012), and these discourses continue to be
mobilized, for instance, to promote GM cotton in Asia and the
introduction of GM corn in (p.8) Africa (Cohen and Paarlberg
2004, Cooper, Lipper, and Zilberman 2005, Paarlberg 2009).
Page 10 of 39
Introduction
A number of scholars have shown that the techno-productivist

discourse relies on a series of highly debatable assumptions.
First, as mentioned above, GM crops do not necessarily have
higher yields than conventional crops.10 Second, there is
already more than enough food production to feed the world’s
population.11 Third, GM crops have been commercially grown
since 1996, yet the most popular and easily available seeds are
soybeans, corn, cotton, and canola—crops produced as inputs
for the feed, food, and fiber industries rather than staples of
poor farmers. Fourth, the increasing concentration of the
agricultural market in the hands of a few biotech and
agrochemical companies makes the pro-poor argument of GM
crops dubious, to say the least.12 In spite of these objections,
the storyline of GM crops as an altruistic and imperative
endeavor still resonates among policymakers and the public,
while opposition to transgenic seeds is sometimes framed as
an expression of middle-class, well-fed northern activists.
In contrast to these approaches, other scholars have examined

GM crops in the context of global capitalism and its
articulation with the state, drawing from world-system theory
and Gramscian analysis (McMichael 2009, Otero 2008a). In
this perspective GM crops are commodities, goods created
with the goal of making a profit. As such they are the
expression of a global food regime, that is, relations of
production and consumption of feed, fiber, and food spanning
the world and led by corporations and usually supported by
the state. From this viewpoint, GM crops are both an outcome
and instrument of a neoliberal food regime. That is, they
emerged from and reinforce the credo of free markets and
unfettered trade fostered by international financial
institutions, global corporations, and pro-business
governments. The vignettes of the 1990s opening this section
condense the salient characteristics of this neoliberal food
regime: led by agribusiness, supported by deregulators, and
seeking to extend US world hegemony.13
Page 11 of 39
Introduction
In this book I engage in a debate with techno-productivist

viewpoints promoting GM crops, while seeking to extend the
critical perspectives of food regime scholars. I do not aspire to
find a safe middle ground between these positions, but rather
to challenge the blind spots and assumptions of the former,
while adding nuance to the latter. I elaborate this point below,
but to anticipate my argument, my goal is to give serious
consideration to mediations, contingency, cultural processes,
situated meanings, spatial dynamics, and the articulation of
multiple scales. For instance, while keeping in mind the key
role of global capitalism underlined by food regime scholars,
(p.9) the ethnographic research presented in this book also
highlights the articulation between global and national
processes and, in turn, the dilemmas faced by peasant social
movements as they seek to maintain national allies while
acting at a provincial and localized scale. Along different lines,
I also seek to challenge the techno-productivist assumption of
an alleged unilinear progress heralded by science and
(bio)technology. In the remainder of this introduction I
elaborate these arguments, providing the theoretical
framework that I empirically flesh out in the ensuing chapters
using ethnographic evidence.
GM Crops, Space, and Scales

The challenge of inspecting GM crops from an ethnographic
perspective is taking into account their world-spanning forces,
regional dimensions, uneven national manifestations, and
localized expressions. A first step in this direction is to refine
our categories of “the global” and “the local,” and offer a more
nuanced account of the connections and disjunctures at
different scales (global, regional, national, and local). An
ethnographic perspective on global processes offers tools for
improving the abstract conceptions of extant globalization
theories, going beyond the global/local binary analyzing how
global forces are experienced in concrete settings (Gowan and
Riain 2000: xiv, Otis 2012) while also inspecting the
articulation of diverse scales (Herod 2009). More specifically,
an ethnographic approach to GM crops in Argentina allows us
to simultaneously focus on the role of global corporations and
the national state, while paying attention to processes of
subnational differentiation (the varied impacts of GM crops in
different regions) and the obstacles faced by peasant
movements when navigating different political scales, from the
provincial to the national.
Page 12 of 39
Introduction
This approach allows us to avoid the misconception of thinking

of the local as the place the global impacts, and to rather see
both as interconnected dimensions. The idea that the global
can be developed by macrostructural views and then filled in
by ethnographic portraits of the local fails to understand, as
sociologist Michael Burawoy argued, that the “the global-local
antinomy is itself misleading, for if something is global there
can be nothing outside that is local” (2001: 156–157). “Global”
and “local” can serve as shorthand expressions as long as we
conceptually keep in mind that they articulate multiple scales
and, as such, they are neither self-evident nor is one contained
in the other. Taking this precaution circumvents the persistent
identification of the global with the universal and the local
with the particular, a conflation that (p.10) confuses the level
of analysis with the geographical scale (Massey 1994). As
anthropologist Anna Tsing aptly put it, the schematic
distinction between global forces and local places “draws us
into globalist fantasies by obscuring the ways that the cultural
processes of all ‘place’ making and all ‘force’ making are both
local and global, that is, both socially and culturally particular
and productive of widely spreading interactions” (2000: 352).
Page 13 of 39
Introduction
In this book, I considered the global forces driving GM crops

as they manifest in regional, national, and local projects and
analyze the connections enacted by social movement leaders,
public officials, agribusinesses, and rural inhabitants. Zooming
in on these connections illuminates the ways in which both the
support and the opposition to GM crops combines global,
national, regional, and localized discourses and actors. GM
crops are part of a project promoted by global corporations
but that gains ground, in Argentina and elsewhere, through
the support of national and local actors. Similar to the
environmental conflicts in Hungary analyzed by Zsuzsa Gille
(2000) where people combined ideas of environmental racism
in a post socialist context, my ethnographic data suggest that
in resisting the negative consequences of GM crops peasants
draw from global discourses while remaining bounded by their
localized historical experiences. The connections fostered by
GM crops also produce innovative exclusions. Like the trends
studied by anthropologist James Ferguson in Africa, the study
of GM crops in Argentina indicate the creation of “situated
understandings of emerging global patterns” that “attend
more adequately not only to exciting new interconnections,
but also to the material inequalities and spatial and scalar
disjunctures that such interconnections both depend on and,
in some ways, help to produce” (2006: 49).
By studying the connections and disjunctures of global

patterns, we can analyze the ways in which the benefits and
impacts of GM crops are unequally distributed across different
global regions and social classes, as food regime scholars
argue. Yet we can take this insight a step further. The food
regime perspective has been criticized for being too focused
on European and North American trajectories and for its
limitations in incorporating national and subnational processes
(Moran et al. 1996). The critical literature on food and
globalization also combines the strengths and weaknesses of
Marxist theory, that is, “what it gains in historical sensibility it
lacks in geographical sensibility,” when “history is the
independent variable, [and] geography the dependent” (Smith
2008: 2–3, 224).14 Acknowledging these criticisms to the food
regime literature, I pay attention to how the impacts of
transgenic agriculture follow uneven geographies within
countries.15
Page 14 of 39
Introduction
(p.11) It is common to find the terms “Global North” and

“Global South” when reading about the relationship between
globalization and agriculture. Terms like the Global North and
the Global South are useful heuristic devices, yet they may
also suggest a dichotomous understanding of the world that
may miss internal variation within countries and potentially
give short shrift to the dynamics of space and place and the
articulation of multiple scales (Herod 2009, Smith 2008: 228–
230). A substantive body of literature discusses the inherent
shortcomings of imagining nations as discrete units, what John
Agnew (1994) calls “territorial traps.” Heeding this insight, in
chapter 1, I outline the process of agrarian neoliberalization in
Argentina and the uneven geographies of the soybean rush,
emphasizing its variegated effects across regions (i.e., the
different impact of GM soybeans in the plains of the Pampa
and northern Argentina). In chapter 2, I reconstruct the
trajectory of grassroots peasant movements in Formosa,
sketching the regional dynamics of radical mobilization in
northeast Argentina in the late 1960s and 1970s. This close
attention to the emplacement of peasantry in Formosa allows
us to better understand their different reactions to the
expansion of GM soybeans and to cases of agrochemical
exposure. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, I complement this attention
to uneven geographies and regional trajectories by showing
how peasants’ contention and demobilization is informed by
the articulation of multiple scales, from the national, to the
provincial, to the localized. More concretely, the processes of
accommodation discussed in chapters 4 and 5 are informed by
the ways in which peasants navigate national and provincial
political scales; in other terms, by the vexed situation of
supporting national administrations that are also allied to the
authoritarian provincial government that peasants have to
endure.
Page 15 of 39
Introduction
Attention to these political issues is useful in capturing the

complex relationship between space and place resulting from
the agrarian dynamics of the GM soybean rush. In their life as
seeds and plants, transgenic crops transform concrete
territories, changing the rural areas where they literally take
root. In the process of being sown, grown, and harvested, GM
crops change concrete spaces, generating effects in the
agricultural and natural environments where they are
introduced. This process of space-making, however, does not
happen in a social vacuum but rather occurs in social
geographies: the production of GM crops materializes in
places with histories, institutions, and organizations entangled
with individual and collective experiences (Massey 2005, Tuan
2001). That is why the up-close, long-term, and in situ tools of
ethnography are especially well-equipped to capture the
environmental and social effects of GM crops. By inspecting
the effects of GM crop production (p.12) in locations with
specific histories, we have the opportunity to see how the
technological package of GM crops unfolds in an environment
in the broad sense of the term, that is, in a geographical space
that is the substrate of social relationships. In the cases
examined in this volume, GM soybeans transform the physical
space of land, and as the use of herbicides affects the water
and air of concrete territories, they also affect a place
embedded in social relationships, places where peasant
families have lived for generations but find it increasingly hard
to continue doing so.
Page 16 of 39
Introduction
In summary, I reconstruct the articulation of global, national,

and regional scales as they are experienced in specific
localities, a perspective that reveals a “grounded
globalization” that sees global processes as resulting from
economic forces but also as a political accomplishment
(Burawoy 2001). I pay attention to these articulations by
reconstructing the links between global corporations (selling
GM seeds and herbicides), regional actors like farmers from
the Pampas (who adopt and diffuse GM seeds and herbicides),
national administrations (regulating and deregulating GM
seeds, herbicides, and appropriating part of the agrarian rent
crated by soybean exports), regional agrarian histories (the
specific relation of the Formosan peasantry, historically
involved in cotton production), and localized experiences (the
lives and everyday experiences of peasants, closely
intertwined with place-making practices). Following
anthropologist Sherry Ortner, I argue that the vantage point of
a grounded globalization can circumvent the pitfalls of an
“ethnographically thin” account of GM crops by paying close
attention to the ambiguities and ambivalences of resistance,
the “ongoing politics among subalterns,” and their cultural
contexts (2006b: 48, original emphasis). This book addresses
these issues by analyzing how peasants resist but also
accommodate transgenic agriculture.
Social Movements and Demobilization

Throughout the world, protests and social movement
campaigns emerged as the inverted image of the intense
promotion of GM crops. Scholars have investigated the
mobilization of farmers, rural social movements, and NGOs
against GM crops in Europe (Heller 2013, Schurman and
Munro 2010), Canada (Andrée 2011, Eaton 2009, Müller 2006,
Prudham 2007, Kinchy 2012), the United States (Buttel 2003,
Carolan 2010, Pechlaner 2012, Schurman and Munro 2010),
Mexico and Central America (Fitting 2011, Kinchy 2012,
Klepek 2012, Pearson 2012, Poitras 2008, Wainwright and
Mercer 2009, Motta 2014), Brazil (Jepson, Brannstrom, and De
Souza 2008, Peschard 2012, Scoones 2008, Motta 2014), India
(Roy 2013, Scoones 2008, Shiva 2000), and South Africa (p.
13) (Scoones 2008). Researchers have also inspected
controversies about GM food in the United States (Guthman
2003, Klintman 2002, Roff 2007), where at least 60 initiatives
in over 20 states have pushed for GM labeling.16
Page 17 of 39
Introduction
Whereas this burgeoning research has provided insights on

the mobilization against GM crops, we do not know much
about the ways in which people accommodate or reconcile
their negative influences or about how small farmers and
peasants maneuver in territories transformed by the expansion
of agribusiness through GM crops. In other words, we know
more about protests against GM crops than about how their
expansion and impacts are negotiated. This knowledge gap
should not come as a surprise if we consider the concepts at
our disposal when it comes to processes of demobilization.
Scholars of social movements have overwhelmingly focused on

explaining mobilization and the emergence of social
movements (Walder 2009). In comparison, processes and
mechanisms of demobilization and social movement decline are
much less understood. Piven and Cloward (1979) extended the
classic thesis of Weber-Michels on the “iron law of
oligarchy” (Michels 1962), arguing that demobilization was a
function of institutionalization. Other scholars, however, have
questioned this proposition (Clemens and Minkoff 2004, Voss
1996). Seminal studies argued that elite support and a lack of
resources could lead to the taming of a social movement
(McAdam 1982: 55–56) and similarly that movements
supported by elites can be “channeled” (Jenkins and Eckert
1986) or “co-opted” when recognized as legitimate actors by
authorities (Gamson 1975).17 Sidney Tarrow’s seminal concept
of “protest cycles” (2005) demonstrated how political
opportunities, information flows, the diffusion of collective
action, and innovative tactics drove upward trends in
contention, but paid less attention to the downward phase of
cycles (Jung 2010). Scholars have also proposed the concepts
of “abeyance structures” (Sawyers and Meyer 1999, Taylor
1989) and “organizational mortality” (Edwards and Marullo
1995) for those instances when movements vanish from the
public sphere or dissolve completely. How can we understand
social movements when they are neither institutionalized nor
disbanded? What ideas and practices give meaning to political
alliances, resources, and organizations that create
opportunities and obstacles for contention?
Page 18 of 39
Introduction
This book addresses these questions to understand why and

how social movements cease to mobilize or why people choose
tactics other than transgressive collective action to address
grievances. As sociologists McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly argue,
social movement scholarship has focused on the link between
organization and action by “selecting on the dependent
variable,” that is, by observing how organization leads to
collective action, a line of (p.14) inquiry that “elide[s] the
more numerous examples in which groups constrain
action” (2008: 325). Similarly, most research has concentrated
on how ideas and symbols inform framing activities resulting
in collective action. But we know much less about negative
cases, those instances “when framings fail to stimulate
collective action” (Benford 1997: 412). In other words, the
mechanisms causing demobilization beg for further
elaboration, since our theoretical toolkit about processes of
demobilization pales in comparison to the availability of
concepts explaining mobilization itself.18 This book contributes
to efforts to observe how social movements mobilize and
demobilize, combine contention and negotiation, seek to profit
from opportunities and avoid threats, all while intertwining
interests and emotions, developing relationships within and
between movements, and interacting with authorities and
adversaries.
Page 19 of 39
Introduction
I argue that, by and large, scholars have explained

demobilization in negative terms, identifying what is lacking or
merely seeing demobilization as the reversing of mobilization,
thus paying scant attention to the active production of
demobilization.19 Whereas most social movement scholarship
investigated the role of formal organizations in demobilization,
here I focus on the cultural aspects that connect
organizational pressures, political actions, and subjective
experiences. Culture is, of course, a complex and debated
term (Sewell Jr. 2005: 152–174, Williams 1983: 87). Meaning-
making processes have been incorporated in the canon of
social movements studies mostly as framing, or the alignment
between individuals’ interests and beliefs and social movement
organizations’ goals that result in collective action (McAdam,
Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, Snow et al. 1986). This understanding
of culture-as-frames inspired the critiques of scholars arguing
that culture can facilitate but also create obstacles for
contention (Polletta 2008), that discourses are multivocal,
open-ended, and ambiguous (Steinberg 1998), and that
meaning-making not only defines frames but also
opportunities, resources, and organizations (Goodwin and
Jasper 2004a, Kurzman 1996, 2008).
I use culture here to refer to forms of talk and interaction that

both enable and constrain contention, providing scripts about
what can or cannot be said and done, and as the context in
which identifications are expressed, rejected, and redefined.
In doing so, I take heed of an influential definition in which
cultural symbols and meanings are understood as “toolkits” to
solve problems and define strategies for action (Swidler 1986:
273). Throughout the book, I scrutinize language as it
delineates the opportunities and obstacles for collective
action, building on research that sees language and meaning
as a key site to study political participation, contention, and
the lack thereof (Baiocchi 2003, Comerford 1999, Eliasoph
1998, Gamson 1992, Lichterman (p.15) 1998, Mische 2008,
Tarrow 2013). I analyze how discourses define “a group’s
place within a social order, its relation to other groups, and
thus its identity, thereby defining the limits of legitimate
agency” (Steinberg 1999a: 16). I thus build on the “cultural
turn” in social movements studies (Goodwin and Jasper 2004b)
yet without disregarding the intertwinement of culture and
situated political economies (e.g., Fantasia 1988, Steinberg
1999a, Thompson 1993).
Page 20 of 39
Introduction
Considering that the line of research on culture and social

movements has overwhelmingly concentrated on the United
States and Europe, more research investigating the enabling
and constraining role of culture in diverse social settings is
needed. Since Latin American polities have been historically
shaped by patronage politics and clientelism (Fox 1994,
Hellman 1994, Helmke and Levitsky 2006, Shefner 2008,
Hilgers 2012a, Taylor 2004), an analysis of mobilization and
demobilization in this region can strengthen social movement
theories by inspecting the ways in which its insights on the
role of culture can be extended to new social contexts.
Whereas political phenomena like democratization, ethnic
conflicts, and revolutions have been analyzed in tandem with
social movements (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), here I
expand our understanding of the links between social
movements and other political phenomena by examining the
connections between contentious politics and patronage
politics.
Page 21 of 39
Introduction
The distribution of resources and the political opportunities

afforded to popular movements in Argentina (and, more
broadly, in Latin America and elsewhere) are embedded in the
logic of patronage politics and clientelism (Auyero, Lapegna,
and Page Poma 2009, Hilgers 2012a). At its most basic,
clientelist relationships involve the exchange of resources or
public employment (or its promise) for political support
(usually as votes or participation in rallies) (Schmidt et al.
1977). These relationships, in turn, involve ideas of reciprocity
and mutual obligations among unequal parties. An inspection
of popular politics in Argentina can shed light on how political
opportunities, organizations, and resources are interpreted
through meaning-making process that, in turn, are imbued in
the logic of clientelism. My goal is thus to incorporate
meaning-making practices to understand mobilization and
demobilization, claiming not only that culture matters, but also
shedding light on how it matters. As Wendy Wolford put it:
“How do cultural norms and practices shape the interaction
between representation and that or those who are being
represented? How do culturally specific understandings
inform the making of categories through which people know
their social universe and mobilize against injustice?” (2010:
24). In focusing on the connection between social movements
and patronage politics to explain demobilization, we can better
understand how a political culture is practiced in everyday (p.
16) interactions (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) while
functioning as a constraining factor for contentious collective
action (Polletta 2008).
Page 22 of 39
Introduction
Furthermore, inspecting patronage arrangements from the

point of view of social movements contributes to discussions
on the role of agency and strategy in clientelism and
demobilization. When analyzed from the outside in, clientelist
arrangements are usually depicted as a material quid pro quo
in which resources are exchanged. In recent years, however,
scholars have refined this traditional view of clientelism by
emphasizing its symbolic aspects; that is, the quotidian
interactions embedded in relations of reciprocity, and the
affective and personalized dimension of exchanges (e.g.,
Auyero 2000, Gay 1994, Roniger and Günes-Ayata 1994, Lazar
2008). In this book, I pay close attention to different strategies
deployed by social movements acting in clientelist contexts. I
show that political support may also translate into eschewing
contention, and that subordinate actors may choose different
strategies to address their grievances—staging protests at
certain moments, obtaining and distributing resources at
others. In doing so, I join the conversation initiated by scholars
of Latin American politics who study the strategic use of
political networks among grassroots activists (Alvarez
Rivadulla 2012, Canel 2010, Hilgers 2009, Lazar 2008, Quirós
2006). Adopting this perspective also bridges the literature on
clientelism with social movement studies, given the latter’s
interest in strategic action (Fligstein and McAdam 2011,
Jasper 2004, Maney et al. 2012). My argument, in a nutshell, is
that people mobilize their agency in creating their
demobilization.
GM Crops, Collective Action, and Global Ethnography

GM crops are a hotly debated public issue with little room for
subtleties or nuanced arguments: analysts are usually in favor
or against transgenics. From a techno-productivist
perspective, GM crops are showcased as the silver bullet to
end hunger, a marvelous technologic development that
deserves nothing but praise, an instrument to lift the world’s
rural poor out of their misery. Within this camp—well
entrenched in the business world, but also among
policymakers, scientists, and academics—any hint of criticism
toward transgenics is dismissed as Luddite, a stance ignoring
how science works and what farmers need. Criticism of GM
crops is even presented as a crime against humanity,
committed by activists who put obstacles in the way of solving
world hunger and helping farmers.
Page 23 of 39
Introduction
In the opposite corner, critics cast accusations at GM crops for

tinkering with Nature (with a capital N), glossing over half a
century of hybrid seeds (p.17) and agrochemical use, and
lending an ear to concerned consumers but not giving much
importance to what farmers actually say and think. More often
than not, anti-GM activists are quick to dismiss anything
resulting from genetic engineering, and tend to idealize
peasants and small farmers as inherently ecologically friendly
or to project onto them their own environmental hopes. As a
result, as anthropologist Glenn Davis Stone argues, both
positions share a common ground in their “overriding
commitment to an ethical black-and-white … intended to
delegitimate an examination of the grays” (2005: 208).
Debates about GM crops are, in short, fraught with polarized
positions.
In this book I do not attempt to find a via media, but rather to

show the blind spots of these positions by analyzing the
concrete consequences of GM herbicide-resistant crops in
rural areas of Argentina (focusing mostly on the effects of GM
soybeans and, in a lesser degree, GM cotton). On the one
hand, as discussed above, I find that the pro-GM techno-
productivist arguments are faulty on several points. By
scrutinizing the uneven development of GM crops in
Argentina, my goal is to underscore the deep entanglement of
agricultural biotechnology and its social and political context.
In doing so, my claim is that promoting transgenic crops as a
strategy for development without considering this broader
context misses the importance of power inequalities.
Furthermore, promoting GM crops as a way to solve hunger
glosses over the fact that the difficulties faced by the rural
poor are, in large part, matters of livelihood and lack of access
to key assets—land, water, credit, and appropriate
technologies, to name just the most salient problems. I flesh
out this argument in chapters 2 and 3, showing how peasants
and small farmers in northern Argentina were developing
environmentally friendly and socially oriented food production
and commercialization initiatives that were cut short by GM
soybean production in their communities.
Page 24 of 39
Introduction
On the other hand, while I draw from critical approaches to

GM crops, I also seek to address some of their limitations. In
chapter 1, I build on the framework developed by food regime
scholars, while the ethnographies presented in chapters 3 to 5
address gaps in this perspective. The framework developed by
food regime scholars combines a world-system perspective
(attentive to the role of agriculture in propelling global
capitalism) and Gramscian analysis (interested in the
relationships between the state and civil society and the
creation of hegemony). I found this framework extremely
useful when putting Argentina in a broader context; yet the
structural bias of this perspective did not fit well when making
sense of my ethnographic data and the messiness of quotidian
interactions. To put it in a metaphor: the world map of food
(p.18) regime scholars helped me to place Argentina in the
region and on the globe, but I needed another cartography to
guide my navigation during fieldwork. In other words, I do not
object the accuracy of the broad picture outlined by food
regime scholars. I seek, however, to also incorporate into their
broad canvas the situated actions of social movement
representatives, members, and sympathizers; their mutual
interactions; their own understandings of GM crops and
agrochemical drifts; and overall, the frictions and
contradictions emerging from these processes. My goal is to
take into account the ideas, interests, and actions of
subordinate actors without considering their emotions as
secondary or disregarding their worldview as inevitably
shaped by the particular history of northern Argentina.
Indeed, the variation I encountered within subordinated
groups pushed me to rethink the influence that food regime
scholars had in the way I initially conceived this study, leading
me to reconsider many of the categories that I carried with me
when entering the field for the first time.
Page 25 of 39
Introduction
These contrasts between the global project entailed in the

expansion of GM crops and its situated, contextual
manifestations beg a series of questions. Can an ethnographic
approach capture the dynamics of GM crops as a global
project? Are face-to-face interactions, interviews, and
observations apt to address global processes? I believe that an
ethnographic perspective on global process and social action
is not only possible but also necessary, for at least two
reasons. First, an ethnographic perspective may provide the
tools to eschew globalist discourses, that is, monolithic and
teleological renderings of global processes. Second, observing
the concrete manifestations of global forces offers windows
into the ways in which people experience them, thus revealing
the role of agency and variation.
Page 26 of 39
Introduction
While it is important to account for the expansion of GM crops

and its intersection with the forces of global capitalism, we
need not see these processes in evolutionary terms. As
historian Frederick Cooper rightly points out, “If one wants to
use globalization as the progressive integration of different
parts of the world into a singular whole, then the argument
falls victim to linearity and teleology” (2005: 111). By
imagining GM crops as embedded in the development of
agrarian capitalism or in the progress of science applied to
agriculture, we can inadvertently submit to the fallacy of
globalism and understand global forces as unstoppable trends
or predetermined destinies. GM crops are part of a broader
global food regime in which powerful actors vie to incorporate
increasing parts of the world into its circuits. Yet this process
is not monolithic, but rather uneven and contested. From the
perspective I develop here, the global project involved in the
expansion of GM crops is neither universal nor predetermined,
but rather “enacted in the materiality of (p.19) practical
encounters” (Tsing 2005: 1). The process of GM crop
expansion is not simply imposed as an external force on the
world’s peripheries nor does it generate the same effects
across different spaces. The expansion of GM crops is a global
project but, as we will see, this world expansion also meets
national, regional, and local projects resulting in diverse
effects. In investigating GM crops from this perspective, I
heed the insights of anthropologist George Marcus by
developing “a research design of juxtapositions in which the
global is collapsed into and made an integral part of parallel,
related local situations rather than something monolithic or
external to them” (1995: 102).20
Page 27 of 39
Introduction
Second, an ethnographic approach forces us to keep people’s

experiences and actions in sight, incorporating the role of
culture, agency, and variation as part of our explanations.
Inspecting the expansion of GM crops from this perspective
illuminates processes of adoption but also of adaptation and
accommodation to transgenic agriculture. By examining GM
crops and their consequences as rural populations experience
them, the project of transgenic agriculture becomes part of a
social environment in which strategies of reproduction take
central stage. Similar to the ways in which Elizabeth Fitting
(2011) analyzes the impact of GM corn in Mexico by putting it
in the context of a decline in peasant agriculture and the
allure of migration to the United States, I analyze the effects
of GM soybeans in the context of social policies and welfare
programs targeting the rural poor and the neoliberalization of
Argentine agriculture. This focus, in turn, provides access to
the varied ways in which peasants and small farmers
understand GM crops on their own terms, a topic that is still
understudied (Ho, Zhao, and Xue 2009).
Page 28 of 39
Introduction
This attention to contingency and agency is particularly well

captured by an ethnographic approach, which can make a key
contribution to the study of social movements and contentious
collective action. An ethnographic focus offers the benefit of
observing both the micro-dynamics of mobilization and
demobilization, and the role of agency in both processes.
Research on social movements has mainly concentrated on
discontinuous, public, and collective claim making (Tilly
2006a: 49). These events leave a “paper trail” than can be
traced, thus classic social movement studies (McAdam 1982,
Schwartz 1976, Tilly 1978) have used newspaper data and
archives to assemble event catalogues in large datasets, a
technique that became widely used (Earl et al. 2004). This
strategy is logical when identifying relationships between
significant variables while covering a large timespan (several
decades or even centuries) or relatively vast geographical
areas (one or more nations). However, certain correlations and
their internal mechanisms may be hard to explain using this
technique alone. Demobilization processes involve
relationships (p.20) that, by definition, do not evolve into
open confrontations with authorities (and thus hardly leave
public records). As such, these are processes that can be best
identified by an up-close and in situ observation of practices
and in-depth interviews. Furthermore, participant observation
among social movements makes it possible to register the
practices and discourses of both leaders and constituencies,
thus avoiding the pitfalls of an “elite bias” (Benford 1997: 421–
422) when scrutinizing meaning-making processes.
Page 29 of 39
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
to these men, without whose life-long toil the great deeds and
thoughts of Greece and Rome might have been as completely lost to
us as the wars of the buried Lake-dwellers or the thoughts of the
Palæolithic man. To take an illustration from S. Benedict’s own
beloved Subiaco, the work of his disciples has been like one of the
great aqueducts of the valley of the Arno—sometimes carried
underground for centuries through the obscurity of unremembered
existence, sometimes emerging to the daylight and borne high upon
the arcade of noble lives, but equally through all its course, bearing
the precious stream of ancient thought from the far off hills of time
into the humming and crowded cities of modern civilisation.”[22]
The Earlier Monkish Scribes.—The literary work begun
under the direction of Cassiodorus in the scriptorium of Viviers, and
enjoined by S. Benedict upon his monks at Monte Cassino, was, as
said, carried on by successive generations of monastic scribes
during a number of centuries. In fact, until the organisation of the
older universities, in the latter part of the twelfth and the beginning of
the thirteenth century, the production and the reproduction of
literature was practically confined to the monasteries. “The
monasteries,” says Maitland, in his erudite and vivacious work, The
Dark Ages, “were, in those days of misrule and turbulence, beyond
all price not only as places where (it may be imperfectly, but better
than elsewhere) God was worshipped, ... but as central points
whence agriculture was to spread over bleak hills and barren downs
and marshy plains, and deal its bread to millions perishing with
hunger and its pestilential train; as repositories of the learning which
then was, and as well-springs for the learning which was to be; as
nurseries of art and science, giving to invention the stimulus, the
means, and the reward; and attracting to themselves every head that
could devise and every hand that could execute; as the nucleus of
the city which in after days of pride should crown its palaces and
bulwarks with the towering cross of its cathedral.”[23] It was fortunate
for the literary future of Europe that the Benedictine Order, which had
charged itself with literary responsibilities, should have secured
almost from the outset so considerable a development and should
for centuries have remained the greatest and most influential of all
the monastic orders. At the beginning of the ninth century,
Charlemagne ordered an inquiry to be made (as into a matter
requiring careful research) as to whether there were any monks who
professed any other rule than the Rule of S. Benedict; from which it
would appear that such monks were considered as rare and
noteworthy exceptions.
While the two monasteries of Cassiodorus in Calabria and the
Benedictine foundation of Monte Cassino near Naples, were entitled
to first reference on the ground of the exceptional influence
exercised by them upon the literary development of the monks, they
were by no means the earliest of the western monastic foundations.
This honour belongs, according to Denk,[24] to the monastery of
Ligugé, near Poitiers (Monasterium Locociagense), founded in 360
a.d. by Bishop Martin of Tours. The second in point of date, that of
Marmoutier, near Tours, was instituted by the same bishop a year or
two later. Gaul proved to be favourable ground for the spread of
monastic tenets and influence, and by the year 400 its foundations
included over two thousand monks.
In 405, S. Honoratus, later Bishop of Arles, founded a monastery
on the island of Lerin, on the south coast of France, which became a
most important centre of learning and the mother of many
monasteries.[25] In the educational work carried on at Lerin, full
consideration was given to classic authors, such as Cicero, Virgil,
and Xenophon, as well as to the writings of the Fathers, and the
scribes were kept busied in the production of copies.
There must have been a certain amount of literary activity also in
the monasteries of the East and of Africa some time before any of
the monastic foundations in Europe had come into existence. The
numerous writings of the Fathers secured a wide circulation among
the faithful, a circulation which could have been possible only
through the existence of efficient staffs of skilled scribes and in
connection with some system of distribution between widely
separated churches. Teachers like Origen in Cæsarea, in the third
century, and S. Jerome in Bethlehem and S. Augustine in Hippo, in
the fifth century, put forth long series of writings, religious,
philosophical, and polemical, with apparently an assured confidence
that these would reach wide circles of contemporary readers, and
that they would be preserved also for generations to come. The
sacking of Rome by Alaric (in 410) is used by S. Augustine as a text
or occasion for the publication of his beautiful conception of “The
City of God” in much the same manner as a preacher of later times
might have based a homily on the burning of Moscow or the fall of
Paris. The preacher of Hippo speaks as if he were addressing, not
the small circle of his African diocese, but mankind at large. And he
was, of course, justified in his faith, for the De Civitate Dei was the
book which, next to the Scriptures, was most surely to be found in
every monastery in Europe, while when the work of the scriptorium
was replaced by the printing-press, it became one of the most
frequently printed books in Europe. It appears from a reference by S.
Augustine, that nuns as well as monks were included among the
African scribes. In speaking of a nun named Melania, who, early in
the fifth century, founded a convent at Tagaste, near Carthage, he
says that she had “gained her living by transcribing manuscripts,”
and mentions that she wrote swiftly, beautifully, and correctly,—
scribebat et celeriter et pulchre, citra errorem.[26]
The scribe-work in the monasteries of Africa and of the East was,
therefore, sufficiently effective to preserve large portions of the
writings of the Fathers and of other early Christian teachers, and it is,
in fact, to the libraries of these Eastern monasteries that is chiefly
due the preservation of the long series of Greek texts which found
their way into Europe after the Renaissance. I have, however, been
able to find no record of the system pursued in the scriptoria and
armaria of the Greek monasteries, and the narrative in the present
chapter is, therefore, confined to a sketch of the literary undertakings
of the monks of the West.
The earliest known example of the work of a European monk
dates from the year 517. The manuscript is in the Capitular library in
Verona, and has been reproduced in fac-simile by Ottley. The script
is that known as half uncial.[27] At the time this manuscript was being
written, Theodoric the Goth was ruling in Italy, with Cassiodorus as
his minister, and the monastery at Viviers was still to be founded.
S. Gregory the Great, who became Pope in 590, exercised an
important influence over the intellectual interests of his age. Gregory
had been charged with having destroyed the ancient monuments of
Rome, with having burned the Palatine library, including the writings
of Cicero and Livy, with having expelled the mathematicians from
Rome, and with having reprimanded Bishop Didier of Vienna (in
Gaul) for teaching grammar to children. Montalembert contends that
these charges are all slanders and that the Pope was not only an
unequalled scholar, but that he fully appreciated the importance for
the intellectual development of the Church, of a knowledge of the
classics. Gregory is quoted as saying, in substance: “The devils
know well that the knowledge of profane literature helps us to
understand sacred literature. In dissuading us from this study, they
act as the Philistines did when they interdicted the Israelites from
making swords and lances, and obliged that nation to come to them
for the sharpening of their axes and plough-shares.”[28] Gregory was
himself the author of a considerable series of writings, and, while his
Latin was not that of Cicero, he contributed (according to Ozanam)
as much as did S. Augustine to form the new Latin, what might be
called the Christian Latin, which was destined to become the
language of the pulpit and the school, and which forms the more
immediate foundation of an important group of the languages of
modern Europe.
His works include the Sacramentary, which determined the
language and the form of the Liturgy, a series of Dialogues, and a
Pastoral, in which were collected a series of discourses planned to
regulate the vocation, life, and doctrines of the pastors. Of this book,
Ozanam says that it gave form and life to the entire hierarchical
body. Then came a series of commentaries on the Scriptures,
followed by no less than thirty-five books called Moralia, which were
commentaries on the Book of Job. His last important production was
a series of Epistles, comprised in thirteen volumes. He may possibly
have been the most voluminous author since classic times, and his
books had the special advantage of reaching circles of readers who
were waiting for them, and of being distributed through the already
extended machinery of the Church.
Another important ecclesiastical author of the same generation
was Isidore, Bishop of Seville. The Spanish Liturgy compiled by him
and known as the Mozarabic, survived the ruin of the Visigothic
Church and was thought by the great Cardinal Ximenes worthy of
resuscitation. Isidore also wrote a history of the Goths and a
translation of the philosophy of Aristotle. He may be considered as
the first scholar to introduce to Europe of the Middle Ages the
teachings of Greek philosophy. His greatest undertaking was,
however, in the form of an encyclopædia, treating, under the heading
of the Seven Liberal Arts, of all the learning that was within his
reach. It was entitled Twenty Books of Etymologies, or The Origin of
Things, and included in its volumes a number of classical fragments
which, without the care of its editor, would probably have perished
forever.
Isidore is the first Christian who arranged and edited for Christians
the literature of antiquity. He died in 636, but the incentive that he
had given to learning and to literature survived him in a numerous
group of disciples.[29] Among Isidore’s pupils was King Sisebut,
whose interest in scholarship caused him to endow liberally a
number of the Spanish monasteries.
The Ecclesiastical Schools and the Clerics as
Scribes.—The so-called secular clergy were, during the earlier
Middle Ages, employed very largely in connection with the business
of the government, being in fact in many regions the only class of the
population possessing the education necessary for the preparation
of documents and the preservation of records. In Italy, towards the
close of the thirteenth century, there came into existence the class of
notaries who took charge of a good many business details which in
Germany and France were cared for by the clergy. Under the
Merovingian kings, there were government officials and judiciary
officials who were laymen. During the rule of the Carlovingians,
however, the writing work of the chapel and of the government
offices was consolidated, falling into the hands of the clerics, or
secular clergy. For a number of centuries, outside of Italy, it was very
exceptional for any documents or for any correspondence to be
written by other than the clergy. Every citizen of importance was
obliged to have his special clericus, clerc, or pfaff, who took care of
his correspondence and accounts. A post of this kind was in fact the
surest means for an ambitious priest to secure in the first place, a
footing in the world, and later, ecclesiastical positions and income.
The secretary or chancellor of the king, was almost always, as a
matter of routine, sooner or later rewarded with a bishopric.
Charlemagne took from among the poor boys in the court school,
one, who was described as optimus dictator et scriptor, and having
trained him as chaplain and secretary, provided for him later a
bishopric.[30]
The use of the word dictator is to be noted as indicating the
mediæval employment of the term in connection with writing. Dictare
seems, from an early date, to have been used in the first place to
indicate instruction in the art of writing, while later it is employed
constantly to specify the direct work of the writer or composer, in the
sense in which one would say to-day that he had indited a letter.
With the same general sense, the term dictamen is used for the thing
indited or for a composition. Hroswitha, the nun of Gandersheim
(whose poems later had the honour of forming the material for one of
the first books printed in South Germany), used the term dictare
continually for activity in authorship. Wattenbach quotes from the
Legenda Aurea of S. Ambrose the words libros quos dictabat propria
manu scribebat (he wrote out with his own hand the books that he
composed).
As long as any portions of the Roman Empire held together and
the classic culture still preserved its influence, a considerable class
of men secured their support through work as scribes. In Italy this
class seems never entirely to have disappeared. Some small circles
of the people retained, even after the land had been many times
overrun by invaders, some interest in the classics, and were
prepared to pay for more or less trustworthy manuscript copies of
these. In Italy also there appears to have been a much larger use of
writing in connection with trade and commerce than obtained
throughout the rest of Europe until a much later time. While in
Germany and France such scholarship as remained was restricted
almost entirely to the ecclesiastics and to the monastery centres, in
Italy the Church, during the earlier period, took a smaller interest in
scholarship. There came into existence, however, a group of literary
laymen, who were in a measure a continuation of or a succession to
the old Latin grammarians, and who maintained some of their
interest in classic culture and preserved, however imperfectly, some
remnants of classic knowledge.
Wattenbach quotes the words of Gerbert,[31] Nosti Quot Scriptores
in Urbibus aut in Agris Italiæ Passim Habeantur (you know how
many writers there are here and there throughout the cities and
fields of Italy).
The schools established under the rule of the Lombards helped to
preserve the art of writing and to widen the range of its experts. By
the time, therefore, of the establishment of the earlier Italian
universities, an organised class of scribes was already in existence
whose skill could be utilised for university work, and, as will be
shown more specifically in a later chapter, the universities took these
scribes under their jurisdiction and extended over them the
protection of university privilege.[32]
In France, after the time of Charlemagne, it was the case, as we
have seen, that those who had any educational or literary ambitions
were almost necessarily obliged to become ecclesiastics, as it was
only in monasteries and in the training schools attached to the
monasteries, that the necessary education could be secured. As one
result of this, the number of ecclesiastics increased much more
rapidly than the number of places in which they could be occupied or
of foundations upon which they could be supported. Priests for
whom no priestly work was found became, therefore, what might be
called lay-clerics, and were employed in connection with the work of
the courts, or of magistrates, or as scribes and secretaries.
In this manner there came into the hands of these lay-clerics, not
only the management of correspondence, personal, official, and
diplomatic, but a very large proportion of the direction of the affairs
with which such correspondence had to do. As far, therefore, as the
clerical personality represented ecclesiastical purposes and aims,
the influence of ecclesiasticism must have been very much greater
during the age in which the art of writing was confined to the Church
than at any earlier or any later period of the world’s history. Such
influence was, however, probably less in fact than in appearance, as
it seems to have been the case that a very large proportion of such
clerics were priests in name only, and that their interests, purposes,
and ambitions were outside of the Church, and were not necessarily
even in sympathy with the development of the control of the Church
over the affairs of the world.
Wattenbach is of opinion that the scribes of this period secured a
larger return for their work than came to any other class of labourers
or officials. Among many other examples, he gives a quotation from
Dümmler concerning a Lombard cleric of Rotland, named Anselm,
who, in 1050, prided himself upon the number of books he had
written, and said: Multos oportet libros scriberes, ut inde precium
sumeres, quo a tuis lenonibus te redimeres.[33] (You ought to write
many books in order to obtain money with which to buy yourself off
from those having claims upon you.)
Notker wrote in 1020 to the Bishop of Sitten, who wanted to obtain
some books: Si vultis ea, sumtibus enim indigent, mittite plures
pergamenas et scribentibus præmia et suscipietis eorum
exempla.[34] (If you want these books, you must send more
parchment and also moneys for the scribes. You will then receive
your copies.)
In the twelfth century, the monks of Tegernsee, under the Abbot
Rupert, were working on the production of the books for the library of
some noble lady.[35] The Brother Liaupold, in Mallerstorf, spoke of
having “earned much money through his pen.” This happened in the
last quarter of the twelfth century. The lines quoted by Wattenbach
were found upon a manuscript bearing Liaupold’s name.[36]
For the libraries of their own monasteries, the monks worked
without direct pay, and it was only later, as the ambition of the
librarians increased or as the business of distributing copies of
manuscripts became more important, that the monasteries found it
worth while to employ, either in place of or in addition to their own
monks, scribes from outside. In Salzburg, Pastor Peter Grillinger
paid, in 1435, to the scribes of the neighbouring monasteries three
hundred gulden for the production of a Bible (probably an illuminated
copy), and presented this to the library of the Cathedral.[37]
In the accounts of the monastery at Aldersbach, Rockinger finds
entries, in 1304, of payments for scriptores librorum.
The well-known manuscript of Henri Bohic was written in 1374 by
a monk of Corbie, who, according to the cash record of his
monastery, received for his work, in addition to the parchment and
other materials, the sum of thirty-six solidos. For the monastery at St.
Gall, Mathias Burer, of Lindau, who was chaplain in Meminger, and
who died in 1485, wrote twenty-four volumes.
In 1470, the same Burer gave to the monastery, in exchange for a
benefice, his entire library. The record does not specify how many
volumes the library comprised. In 1350, a certain Constantine was
arrested in Erfurt as a heretic. Special efforts were made to save him
from death or banishment on the ground that he was a skilled scribe.
The record does not appear to show whether or not this plea was
successful.
Conrad de Mure speaks of women working as scribes during the
latter part of the thirteenth century. It is probable that these women
were nuns, but it is not so specified. In the Histoire de l’Imprimerie[38]
reference is made to a woman who appears to have acted as an
independent scribe—that is to say, not to have been attached to the
university or to the guild of booksellers.
On the tax list of Paris, in 1292, are recorded twenty-four
escrivains.[39] It is probable that the actual number was much
greater, as the scribes who were ecclesiastics were exempt from
taxation, and their names, therefore, would not have appeared upon
the list.
In 1460, a certain Ducret, clerc à Dijon, received from the Duke for
his work as scribe, a groschen for each sheet, which is referred to as
the prix accoustumé.[40]
In 1401, Peter of Bacharach, described as a citizen of Mainz,
wrote out for the Court at Eltville (Elfeld) a Schwabenspiegel. This is
to be noted because it is an example of scribe work being done by
one who was not a cleric. Burkard Zink tells us that in 1420, being in
Augsburg, he took unto himself a wife. She had nothing and he had
nothing, but she earned money with her spinning-wheel and he with
his pen. In the first week he wrote vier sextern des grossen papiers,
karta regal, and the ecclesiastics for whom the work was being done
were so well pleased with it that they gave him for two sexterns four
groschen. His week’s work brought him sixteen groschen, or forty
cents.[41] Clara Hatzlern, a citizen of Augsburg, is recorded as
having written for money between the years 1452 and 1476. A copy
of a Schwabenspiegel transcribed by her was contained in the
collection at Lambach.[42]
The examples named indicate what was, in any case, probably the
only class of scribe work done outside of the monasteries and
outside of the universities or before the university period, by the few
laymen who were able to write. Their labour was devoted exclusively
to the production of books in the tongue of the people; if work in
Latin were required, it was still necessary (at least until the institution
in the thirteenth century of university scribes) to apply to the
monasteries. With the development of literature in Italy, during the
following century, there came many complaints concerning the lack
of educated scribes competent to manifold the works. These
complaints, as well as to the lack of writers as concerning the
ignorance and carelessness shown in their work, continued as late
as the time of the Humanists, and are repeated by Petrarch and
Boccaccio.
Terms Used for Scribe-Work.—With the Greeks, the
term γραμματεύς denoted frequently a “magistrate.” The term
ταχυγράφοι corresponded as nearly as might be with our
“stenographer.” For this the Romans used the form notarius. The
scribes whose work was devoted to books were called, under the
later empire, bibliographoi or καλλιγράφοι. The name καλλιγράφος
was applied to the Emperor, Theodosius II. Montfaucon gives a list of
the names of the Greek scribes who were known to him.[43] The
oldest dates from 759, and the next in order from 890 a.d. The oldest
Plato manuscript in the Bodleian library was written in 896 for the
Diaconus Arethas of Patras. Arethas was, later, Archbishop of
Cæsarea, and had also had written for him a Euclid, and in 914 a
group of theological works. His scribes were the calligraph John, a
cleric named Stephen, and a notarius whose name is not given.[44]
The terms librarius, scriptor, and antiquarius were also used for
scribes making copies of books, while notarius was more likely to
denote a clerk whose work was limited to the preparation of
documents. Alcuin speaks of employing notarii.
In the inscription in a manuscript by Engelberg of the twelfth
century, we find the lines: Hic Augustini liber est atque Frowini; alter
dictavit, alter scribendo notavit.[45] This indicates that Augustine was
the author, while Frowin served as scribe. A manuscript of the sixth
century, contained in the Chapter-House library in Verona, bears the
signature Antiquarius Eulalius. A manuscript of Orosius, written in
the seventh century, is inscribed: Confectus codex in statione Viliaric
Antiquarii. (A codex completed in the writing-stall of Viliaric the
scribe.) This scribe was probably a Goth, as among the signatures in
a Ravenna document, containing the list of the clerics of the Gothic
Church, occurs the name Viljaric bokareis.[46] Otto von Freising says
of his notarius, Ragewin: Qui hanc historiam ex ore nostro subnotavit
(who wrote down this story from my lips); and Gunther, in 1212,
complains of a headache which he had brought upon himself ut
verba inventa notario vix possim exprimere, that is in the attempt to
shape the words that he was dictating to his clerks. It was in Italy
that the notarii first became of sufficient importance to organise
themselves into a profession and to undertake the training, for other
work, of young scribes, and it was from Italy that the scribes were
gradually distributed throughout Europe. Their most important
employment for some time in Italy was in connection with the work of
the Church, and particularly in the preparation and manifolding of the
documents sent out from Rome. The special script that was adopted
for the work of the Papal office was known as scripta notaria.[47]
According to Wattenbach, the use of papyrus for the documents of
the Church, and even for the Papal Bulls, extended as late as the
tenth century. Sickel speaks of a Bull of Benedict VIII., of 1022, as
the latest known to him which is written on papyrus.
The term chartularii, or cartularii, was applied to clerics originally
trained for the work of the Church, but who occasionally devoted
themselves also to the manifolding of books. In the memoir of
Arnest, who was the first Archbishop of Prague, it was related that he
always kept three cartularii at work in the transcribing of books. In
the twelfth century, Ordericus speaks of the monks who write books
both as antiquarii and as librarii.[48] Richard de Bury uses the term in
describing the renewal of old manuscripts, and restricts it to scribes
who possessed scholarly and critical knowledge. Petrarch makes a
similar application.[49] The term dictare was, during the Middle Ages,
usually employed to describe the author’s work in composing, or in
composing and writing with his own hand, and bears but seldom the
meaning of “dictate.” The proper rendering would be more nearly our
word “indite.”
The term used during the earlier Middle Ages to denote the
Scriptures was not Biblia, but Bibliotheca. According to Maitland, the
latter term has its origin with S. Jerome, who, in offering to lend
books to his correspondent Florentius, writes: ... et quoniam
largiente Domino, multis sacræ bibliothecæ codicibus abundamus,
etc.[50] (And since by the grace of God, we possess a great many
codices of the sacred writings.)
In nearly every instance in which reference is made to the
complete collection of the Scriptures, the term used is Bibliotheca
integra, or Bibliotheca tota. It was evidently the case that for
centuries after the acceptance of the Canon, the several divisions or
books of which the Bible consists were still frequently considered in
the light of separate and independent works, and were transcribed
and circulated separately.
S. Columba, the Apostle to Caledonia.—One of the
earliest of the monks of the North of Europe whose life was
associated with scholarship and intellectual influence, was S.
Columba, the Apostle to Caledonia, whose life covered the term
between the years 521 and 597. Columba belongs to the list of Irish
saints, although the larger portion of his life’s work was done in
Scotland. Before he had reached the age of twenty-five, he had
presided over the foundation of no less than twenty-seven
monasteries in Ireland, the oldest of which were Darrow and Derry;
the latter, having long been the seat of a great Catholic bishopric,
became, under its modern name of Londonderry, the bulwark of the
Protestant contest against the efforts of the last of the Stuart kings.
The texts have been preserved of a number of songs ascribed to
Columba, and, whether or not these verses were really the work of
the monk, the tradition that he was the first of the Irish poets
doubtless has foundation. In the time of Columba, the Irish
monasteries already possessed texts in greater quantity than could
be found in the monasteries of Scotland or England, but even in
Ireland manuscripts were rare and costly, and were preserved with
jealous care in the monastic libraries. Not only was very great value
put upon these volumes, but they were even supposed to possess
the emotions and the passions of living beings. Columba was himself
a collector of manuscripts, and his biography by O’Donnell attributes
to him the laborious feat of having transcribed with his own hand
three hundred copies of the Psalter. According to one of the stories,
Columba journeyed to Ossory in the south-west to visit a holy and
very learned recluse, a doctor of laws and philosophy, named
Longarad. Columba asked leave to examine the doctor’s books, and
when the old man refused, the monk burst out in an imprecation:
“May thy books no longer do thee any good, neither to them who
come after thee, since thou takest occasion by them to show thine
inhospitality.” The curse was heard, and after Longarad died, his
books became unintelligible. An author of the ninth century says that
the books still existed, but that no man could read them.[51]
Another story speaks of Columba’s undertaking, while visiting his
ancient master Finnian, to make a clandestine and hurried copy of
the abbot’s Psalter. He shut himself up at night in the church where
the Psalter was deposited, and the light needed for his nocturnal
work radiated from his left hand while he wrote with the right. A
curious wanderer, passing the church, was attracted by the singular
light, and looked in through the keyhole, and while his face was
pressed against the door his eye was suddenly torn out by a crane
which was roosting in the church. The wanderer went with his story
to the abbot, and Finnian, indignant at what he considered to be a
theft, claimed from Columba the copy which the monk had prepared,
contending that a copy made without permission ought to belong to
the owner of the original, on the ground that the transcript is the
offspring of the original work. As far as I have been able to ascertain,
this is the first instance which occurs in the history of European
literature of a contention for copyright. Columba refused to give up
his manuscript, and the question was referred to King Diarmid, or
Dermott, in the palace at Tara. The King’s judgment was given in a
rustic phrase which has passed into a proverb in Ireland: “To every
cow her calf [le gach boin a boinin], and consequently to every book
its copy.”[52]
Columba protested loudly, and threatened the King with
vengeance. He retired to his own province chanting the song of trust,
the text of which has been preserved and which is sacred as one of
the most authentic relics of the ancient Irish tongue. He succeeded
in arousing against the King the great and powerful clans of his
relatives and friends, and after a fierce struggle the King was
overcome and was obliged to take refuge at Tara.
The manuscript which had been the object of this strange conflict
of copyright, a conflict which developed into a civil war, was
afterwards venerated as a kind of national military and religious
palladium. Under the name of Cathac, or “the fighter,” the Latin
Psalter said to have been transcribed by Columba was enshrined in
the base of a portable altar as the national relic of the O’Donnell
clan. It was preserved for 1300 years in the O’Donnell family, and as
late as 1867, belonged to a baronet of that name, who placed it on
exhibition in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. O’Curry prints
a fac-simile of a fragment of the manuscript, which he believes to be
in the hand-writing of S. Columba, and O’Curry and Reeves are in
accord in the opinion that the famous copy of the Gospels known as
the “Book of Kells” is also the work of the poet monk.[53]
After the successful issue of his contest with Finnian, S. Columba
journeyed through the land, making a kind of expiatory pilgrimage for
the purpose of atoning for the bloodshed of which he had been the
cause. He went for counsel to his soul-friend or confessor, S.
Laisren. The saint bade him as a penance leave Ireland and go and
win souls for Christ, as many as the lives that had been lost in the
battle of Culdreimhne, and never again look upon his native land. He
finally took up his abode in the desolate little island of Iona, on the
coast of Scotland. Other refugees were attracted to the island by the
fame of the saint, and there finally came into existence on the barren
rocks a great monastery which for centuries exercised throughout
Britain and North Europe a wide-spread influence in behalf of higher
Christianity and of intellectual life.
From Iona and its associated monasteries of Ireland and Scotland
came scholarly teachers to France and Germany whose influence
was important in giving a new direction to the work of later
generations of monks. Among the Continental monasteries in which
was developed through such influence a higher range of scholarly
activity, were Luxeuil (in the Vosges Mountains), Corbie (on the
Somme), Bobbio (in Lombardy), and St. Gall (in Switzerland).
Wattenbach says that, notwithstanding their scholarly knowledge,
these Scotch monks were wild and careless in their orthography. As
an example of the barbarity of style and of form, he quotes a
manuscript of the date of 750 (written during the rule of Pepin).
A number of years later, when, through the monks of Iona and
under the general direction of S. Columba, a number of monasteries
had been founded throughout Scotland, Columba had occasion to
plead before the Parliament of Drumceitt in behalf of the Bards, who
might be called the authors of their time, and with whom the poet
monk had a keen personal sympathy. The Bards of Ireland and
Britain were at once the poets, the genealogists, the historians, and
the musicians of their countries, and their position and their influence
constituted a very characteristic feature of Celtic life in the centuries
between 500 and 800.
The Irish nation, always enamoured of its traditions, its fabulous
antiquity, and its local glories, regarded with ardent sympathy the
men who could clothe in a poetic dress all the law and the
superstitions of the past, and who could give literary form and force
to the passions and the interests of the present. The Bards were
divided into three orders: The Fileas, who sang of religion and war;
the Brehons, whose name is associated with the ancient laws of the
country which they versified and recited; and the Seanachies, who
enshrined in verse the national history and antiquities, and, above
all, the genealogies and the prerogatives of the ancient families who
were regarded as especially representative of the national and
warlike passions of the Irish people.[54]
The great influence and power enjoyed by the Bards had naturally
produced not a few abuses, and at the time of the Parliament of
Drumceitt their popularity had suffered and a violent opposition had
been raised against them. They were charged with insolence and
with greed, and they were particularly censured for having made a
traffic and a trade of their poetry, a charge which recalls some of the
criticisms of classic times.
The enmities raised against them had gathered so much force that
King Aedh found himself compelled to propose to the Assembly of
Drumceitt the abolition of the Order and the abandonment, or, as one
authority suggests, the massacre of the Bards. It would appear as if
Ireland had been suffering from an excess of poetic utterances and
felt that some revolutionary methods were required in order to
restore to the land quiet and peace. Montalembert is of opinion that
the clergy did not take any part in the prosecution of a class which
they might, not unnaturally, have regarded as their rivals. The Bards
had, however, for the most part kept in friendly relations with the
bishops, monks, and saints, and each monastery, like each prince
and lord, possessed a Bard (who in later years became an annalist)
whose chief office it was to sing the glory and record the history of
the community.
Nevertheless, the Bards were certainly, as a body, a residuum of
the paganism that had been so recently supplanted, and it is
probable that the Church, if not joining in the onslaught upon their
body, was not prepared to take any active part in their defence. It
seems as if the decision of the Assembly, under the influence of King
Aedh, would certainly have been adverse to the poets. It was
Columba, the poet monk, who saved them. He, who was born a poet
and who, to the last day of his life, remained a poet, interceded for
the Bards with such eloquence and earnestness that his plea had to
be listened to. He claimed that the general exile of the poets would
be the death of a venerated antiquity and of a literature which was a
part of the country’s life. “The bright corn must not be burned,” he
said, “because of the weeds that mingled with it.”[55] Influenced by
his impassioned plea, the Assembly yielded at length, under the
condition that the number of Bards should be henceforth limited and
that the Order should be placed under certain rules to be framed by
Columba himself. Thus poetry was to continue to exist, but it was not
to be allowed to oppress the community with its redundance.
It is doubtless the case that one reason for the exceptional fame of
Columba and the large amount of legendary detail that has been
preserved of his achievements, was this great service that he had
rendered to the poets of his time. They showed their gratitude by
exalting his glory in numberless songs and recitals, and it is chiefly
from these that has been made up the narrative of the saint’s life.
Another result of this intervention on the part of the monk for the
protection of the poets was a still closer association between the
Church and the literary spirit of the age. All antagonism between the
religious ideal and the influence of the poetry of the Bards seems
from this time to have disappeared. The songs of the Bards were no
longer in any measure devoted to the cause of paganism, but music
and poetry became closely identified with the ideals of the Church
and with the work of the monasteries. The Church had preserved the
poets, and poetry became the faithful handmaid of the Church.
Nuns as Scribes.—One of the oldest rules relating to
convents, that of S. Cæsarius of Arles, instituted in the fifth century
and brought a hundred years later to Poitiers by S. Radegonde,
required that all the sisters should be able to read and that they
should devote two hours a day to study—Omnes bonæ litteras
discant, etc.[56]
While the educational work in the convent schools was for the
most part not carried on beyond what might be called elementary
classes, there were not a few examples of abbesses whose
scholastic attainments would rival those of the abbots. Montalembert
speaks of convents founded, under the auspices of S. Jerome, by S.
Paula and her daughter, and is not prepared to admit that in any
essential detail the history of S. Paula is legendary. He reminds us
that Hebrew and Greek were the daily study of these two admirable
women, who advised S. Jerome in all his difficulties and cheered him
under all discouragements.[57] Montalembert is probably on firmer
ground when he speaks of the scholarly attainments of S. Aura, the
friend of S. Eloi, and of the nun Bertile, whose learned lectures on
Holy Scripture drew to Chelles in the sixth century a large concourse
of auditors of both sexes. S. Radegonde, known by her profound
studies of the three Fathers, S. Gregory, S. Basle, and S.
Athanasius, is commemorated by Fortunatus, as is also Gertrude,
Abbess of Nivelle, who sent messengers to Rome and to Ireland to
buy books.[58] I do not find a record of the date of these book-buying
expeditions of the abbess.
In Germany, the list of the learned nuns includes S. Lioba, who
was said to be so eager for knowledge that she never left her books
except for divine service. She was a pupil of S. Boniface, and to her
was due the framing of the system of instruction instituted after the
mission of S. Boniface in North Germany. Hroswitha, the illustrious
nun of Gandersheim (who died in 997), has been referred to more
than once. Hroswitha’s dramatic poetry has been preserved for
nearly eight centuries, and has had the honour of being reprinted as
late as 1857. Her writings included a history in verse of Otho the
Great, and the lives of several saints. Her most important works,
however, were sacred dramas composed by her to be acted by the
nuns of the convent. M. Magin points out that these dramas show an
intimate acquaintance with the authors of classic antiquity.[59]
Curiously enough, there was, nearly a century earlier, another
Hroswitha in Gandersheim, who was the daughter of the Duke of
Saxony, and who became the fourth abbess of the convent. She
composed a much esteemed treatise on logic.[60]
Cecilia, daughter of William the Conqueror, who was Abbess of
Kucaen, won fame for her school in grammar, philosophy, and in
poetry. Herrad of Landsberg, who governed forty-six noble nuns at
Mont St. Odile in Alsace, composed, under the name of Hortus
Delictarum, a sort of cosmology, which is recorded as the first
attempt at a scientific encyclopædia, and which is noted for the
breadth of its ideas on painting, philosophy, mythology, and history.
This was issued shortly after the death of William the Conqueror.[61]
To the Abbess of Eichstadt, who died about 1120, Germany is
indebted for the preservation of the Heldenbuch, a treasury of heroic
stories.[62]
The principal and most constant occupation of the learned
Benedictine nuns was the transcription of manuscripts. It is difficult to
estimate too highly the extent of the services rendered by these
feminine hands to learning and to history throughout the Middle
Ages. They brought to the work a dexterity, an elegance of
attainment, and an assiduity which the monks themselves could not
attain, and some of the most beautiful specimens of caligraphy which
have been preserved from the Middle Ages are the work of the nuns.
The devotion of nuns as scribes began indeed with the early ages of
Christian times. Eusebius speaks of young maidens whom the
learned men of his time employed as copyists.[63] In the fifth century,
S. Melania the younger distinguished herself by the beauty and
exactness of her transcripts.[64] In the sixth century, the nuns of the
convent at Arles, incited by the example of the Abbess of St.
Césaire, acquired a no less brilliant reputation. In the seventh
century, S. Gertrude, who was learned in the Holy Scriptures, sent to
Rome to ask not only for works of the highest Christian poetry, but
also for teachers capable of instructing her nuns to comprehend
certain allegories.[65] In the eighth century, S. Boniface begged the
abbess to write out for him in golden letters the Epistle of S. Peter.
Cæsarius of Arles gave instructions that in the convents which had
been founded by him and the supervision of which rested with his
sister, the “Virgins of Christ” should give their time between their
prayers and psalms to the reading and to the writing of holy
works.[66] In the eighth century the nuns of Maseyk, in Holland,
busied themselves in a similar fashion, not only in writing, but
particularly in illuminating (etiam scribendo atque pingendo), in which
they became proficients.[67]
In the ninth century, the Benedictine nuns of Eck on the Meuse,
and especially the two abbesses Harlinde and Renilde, attained
great celebrity by their caligraphic work and by the beauty of the
illuminated designs used in their manuscripts.[68] In the time of S.
Gregory VII., a nun at Wessobrunn, in Bavaria, named Diemude,
undertook to transcribe a series of important works, the mere
enumeration of which would startle modern readers. These works
formed, as we read in the saint’s epitaph, a whole library, which she
offered as a tribute to S. Peter. The production of this library still left
time for Diemude to carry on with Herluca, a nun of the neighbouring
convent of Eppach, a correspondence remarkable as well for its
grace of expression as for its spiritual insight.[69] A list of her
transcripts is given in the section on the scriptorium.
Among other convent scribes is recorded the name of the nun
Gita, in Schwarzenthau, who made transcripts, about 1175, of the
writings of her abbot, Irimbert. In Mallesdorf, at about the same time,
a nun of Scottish parents, named Leukardis, who understood Greek,
Latin, and German, was active in the scriptorium, and her work
excited so much admiration that the monk Laiupold, himself a
famous scribe, instituted in her memory an anniversarium.[70]
Brother Idung sent his dialogues concerning the monks of Clugni
and the Cistercians to the nuns of Niedermünster, near Regensburg,
ut legibiliter scribatur et diligenter emendetur ab aliquibus
sororibus.[71] In the same century (the twelfth) the names of
Gertrude, Sibilia, and other nuns appear on the transcript of the
codex written for the Domini Monasterienses, which codex came into
the library of Arnstein in exchange for a copy of the Pastorals of
Gregory. Johann Gerson, writing in 1423, refers with cordial

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Soybeans and Power: Genetically

Modified Crops, Environmental Politics,

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Socio Economic Impact Assessment of Genetically

The Politics of Genetically Modified Organisms in the

Genetically Modified Organisms in Food Production

Social Movements and Public Policies in Southern

Black Movements Performance and Cultural Politics

The Politics of Common Sense How Social Movements Use

Social Movements in Chile: Organization, Trajectories,

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops,

Print publication date: 2016

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: genetically modified crops, neoliberal globalization, neoliberal food

In February 2003, Nélida woke up on her small farm early as

In the ensuing months, peasants reacted to this environmental

Fast-forward six years, to February 2009, when Nélida awoke

In this book, I scrutinize these events to tackle two issues:

Why should we be concerned about GM crops and the fate of

(p.3) The findings presented in this book apply to soybeans

Second, by studying processes of demobilization, we can have

GM Crops as Global Project

Those “new things” that the executive referred to were seeds

Genetically modified seeds were created in the 1990s, but are

At least four salient features of transgenics allow us to identify

(p.5) In the United States, GM crops have expanded rapidly

In South America, the diffusion of GM crops intersected with

Ultimately, the United Republic of Soybeans ad proved to be

The promotion of GM crops grew through a cross pollination

A number of scholars have shown that the techno-productivist

In contrast to these approaches, other scholars have examined

In this book I engage in a debate with techno-productivist

GM Crops, Space, and Scales

This approach allows us to avoid the misconception of thinking

In this book, I considered the global forces driving GM crops

By studying the connections and disjunctures of global

(p.11) It is common to find the terms “Global North” and

Attention to these political issues is useful in capturing the

In summary, I reconstruct the articulation of global, national,

Social Movements and Demobilization

Whereas this burgeoning research has provided insights on

Scholars of social movements have overwhelmingly focused on

This book addresses these questions to understand why and

I argue that, by and large, scholars have explained

I use culture here to refer to forms of talk and interaction that

Considering that the line of research on culture and social

The distribution of resources and the political opportunities

Furthermore, inspecting patronage arrangements from the

GM Crops, Collective Action, and Global Ethnography

In the opposite corner, critics cast accusations at GM crops for

In this book I do not attempt to find a via media, but rather to

On the other hand, while I draw from critical approaches to

These contrasts between the global project entailed in the

While it is important to account for the expansion of GM crops

Second, an ethnographic approach forces us to keep people’s

This attention to contingency and agency is particularly well

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