Publication

This is an analysis of the way that the colonial-era model of plantation production in Southeast Asia disciplined plants and people and, of most importance, the way that production relations between plants and people were conceived. This discipline was challenged during historic moments of crisis that stimulated the imagination of alternative modes of production. The analysis will focus on the histories of three plants in particular: black pepper (Piper nigrum), Para rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), and a sword grass (Imperata cylindrica). Notable events in their histories include the proscription of pepper cultivation in the sixteenth century Hikayat Banjar in southeastern Borneo; the tribal dream of rice-eating rubber in the 1930s in western Borneo and the contemporaneous international effort to restrict smallholder rubber cultivation; and the lengthy history of productive native management of Imperata and disbelief in such management by plantation managers and government officials. Each case represents conflict between alternative and competing systems of crop management, which consists in part in transcendent exercises to imagine, or deny, alternative systems of production. These leaps of the imagination are nourished by a focus on the human-nonhuman divide, especially during historic moments of crisis.