Growth media

Ng, Huiying (2025): Growth media: articulating agroecological learning assemblages in Thailand. Dissertation, LMU München: Faculty of Cultural Studies

Abstract

A key source of Thailand’s agrarian transformation has been its enfolding into a US-led global capitalist order. Since 1950, marginalised peasants have been transformed into marginalised proletariat by an export-oriented industrialisation strategy crafted with US support and military intelligence. In this transformation, a strata of local rural elites and new patronage relations rose with state-led capitalist development. This dissertation looks at how agroecological practices create material and aesthetic transformations that shift the terms of patronage. Because patronage relations are woven into the bindings of industrial agriculture, breaking away means struggling against patronage, or reworking them. I examine the relations between the living beings that farmers work with, and humans, to understand how micropolitical relations are resisted or reworked. Farmers’ knowledges of non-industrial agricultural practices have been subjugated under the current historical bloc’s dominant food system. How these knowledges become articulable is a question of aesthetic and material transformation. While the history of materialism has focused on material transformation, growth media’s sensory effects on their cultivators make it impossible to ignore how aesthetic experience shapes farmers’ livelihood choices. In contrast, the current historical bloc in Thailand is held intact by the aesthetic contours of Thailand’s industrialised agricultural production: for proletarians and peasant-workers—the use of intimidation and fear, isolation and dullness, depletion and homogenisation; for bourgeoisie and nobility—romanticism, novelty, and humanitarianism. I take a Gramscian approach to my understanding of how learning processes fit within class struggle. Paying equal attention to learning and articulation, I centre the question: what draws the history of materialism closer to agroecology as a way of life? What are the conditions that support an agroecological transition? An emphasis on learning enables me to follow the trajectory subaltern knowledge takes, as it comes into consciousness of itself and the class limits of dominant groups. The dissertation is structured as a set of unfolding ‘terms of transition’ set in three social worlds. In paired chapters composed across three scenes, I offer a term that builds the arguments of the next pair of chapters. Together, they build the dissertation’s core argument: that growth media are part of the infrastructure of an agroecological learning assemblage, and articulate the ideologies of a latent historical bloc. My use of the learning assemblage arises from poststructural understandings of power, and I blend it into a Gramscian analysis of structural constraints and transformation. Chapters 1 to 3 set up the context of the dissertation. Chapter 1 provides a political history of Thailand’s agrarian movements. It shows the significance of translocal learning in shaping agrarian movements and civil society from the 1970s to 2000s. I show how ideological struggles of the 1970s–1990s shaped a historical bloc that my interlocutors—activists, farmers, government scientists, and an extension worker—navigate in the 2020s. I show that the fracture of the agrarian movement after 1997 depicts the way patronage relations in Thai sakdina, akin to feudalism, has played a central role in maintaining the current historical bloc. Chapter 2 lays out my methodology, which is guided by Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodologies. Chapter 3 describes my approach to more-than-human ethnography, where I describe the agricultural infrastructure of the current historical bloc in Thailand, and the structure of the dissertation. In chapters 4 and 5, ‘Growth Media’ and ‘Infrastructure’, I turn to Mae Tha village. Looking at a seed saver’s work, I focus on seeds and germplasm, and shape the concept of ‘growth media’. In chapter 5, I draw out growth media’s relations within the infrastructure of an agroecological learning assemblage. Elaborating Rosaldo’s discussion of the cultural force of emotion, and ritual, I show how subdistrict and village infrastructure to protect against the state’s claims on forestlands have emerged alongside regular practices that guard against the pressure of such laws, while cultivating watchfulness, and protecting play. As media that holds the attention of learners in an agroecological learning assemblage, growth media articulate ideologies about what one eats, how one eats, how that food is grown, and what growing that food in turn, grows. Neither textual nor visual media, they are living beings and forms that humans learn to cultivate, to co-create with and discipline. As cultivation practices like organic production or genetic modification become bound up with the ideologies of social groups, growth media may come to profoundly provoke the sentiments of groups its production excludes or threatens. In chapter 6, ‘More-than-human Kinship’, following coffee as growth media leads me to observe a more-than-human kinship between coffee and its highland cultivators. Highland coffee farmers’ ethnicity marks their experience of the state and its ideologies. As movements for ethnic minority rights brought citizenship and mobility, there has been a flow of remittance capital and ideas into the village. An earlier generation’s common cultural orientation has diffracted into new orientations. Norms which privileged men’s roles and knowledge in matters of lineage and spiritual protection are giving way to new values and religious beliefs. As gender norms shift in the village, the activities of social reproduction are becoming more widely articulated. Simultaneously, the appreciation of coffee-as-tree is growing along with a national appetite for speciality coffee. This is leading growers’ noses and tastebuds in a new direction, building on the cultivation knowledge of mothers and grandmothers. New experimentation fuels an aesthetic shift, propelling an energetic charge amongst cultivators which is gathering momentum. Highlanders however, have and continue to face lowland revanchism: from state intimidation by forestry officials to exploitative lowland practices. In this context, as household partnerships with women’s equal presence begin to succeed, other farmers take their lead. Knowledges which women have held, by dint of their role in everyday household and agricultural reproduction, are becoming visible, valued, accounted for, supported, and compensated. This shift ripples through dimensions of Akha custom and village life. But not everyone is able to follow this new excitement around coffee. Chapter 7, ‘Outsiderness’, asks how a village deals with difference, as some households become excluded from opportunities presented by growth media. It looks at the consequences of generational landlessness in agrarian environments. Changes in cultural orientation—with religious conversion from Akha animism to Christianity, Thai Buddhism, and a lesser-known practice—has led to the absence of rituals for collectivity and relational exchange, beyond existing kin networks. Individual forms of coping and social exclusion are forming. The effects of increasing proletarianization amongst a segment of the village are increasingly felt: traits of masculinity from work migrate home, intimidating women and children. Two funerals reveal how villagers become outsiders at home, and I discuss state-led precarisation of agricultural labour. I end the chapter with a prospective analysis of how peasant-workers and proletarianising households may find commonality. Together, chapters 6 and 7 chart the experiences of two emerging social groups in Baan Klang: peasant-workers and proletarians. Where peasant-workers build on land, generational knowledge, and a more-than-human kinship with coffee trees, individuals who acquire income primarily through cyclical migration, with minimal land or relatives to turn to for cultivation knowledge, are becoming proletarian. The experiences they undergo while in labour destination countries return with them to the village, forging an as-yet inarticulable awareness of implicit hierarchies within it. Finally, chapter 8, ‘Articulation’, brings together the terms laid out in earlier chapters, to look at the contradictions confronting a government extension worker in his work with soil. Looking at him as a subaltern organic intellectual, I make the argument that he works in a political moment of soil’s rearticulation into the agri-food system. A shift towards biologically-based agricultural practices is occurring. While this happens, industrial agricultural practices that went into reproducing an industrialised labour force are becoming disarticulated. The dominant social groups which maintained and profited from these practices, ensuring they stayed hegemonic, are themselves having to pivot to sustainability. Seeds of the latent historical bloc are in the state’s Land Development Department (LDD) as well, as scientists there actively support and encourage farmers to adopt the use of biological fertilisers. As conditions shift so counter-hegemonic practices and ideologies begin to strengthen, growth media and the more-than-human kinship around them are beginning to circulate. I argue this is precisely how practices and ideologies of a latent historical bloc in Baan Klang and beyond, begin to be more widely articulated. I conclude by showing that the fractures of the agrarian movement in Thailand after 1997 have simple, but heartrending reasons: ownership struggles, sakdina-like hierarchies, and the challenge of translating subjugated knowledges. What added to the difficulty were the social, political, and ecological conditions underlying the hegemony of the agricultural infrastructure maintained by the historical bloc in Thailand after the 1960s. This dominant food system was plugged in to what McMichael and Friedmann have called the (post-Cold War) US food regime. Ecological conditions today are forcing a transition from industrial agricultural practices that emerged out of this post-World War II military-industrial complex. A war of movement is again underway to establish dominance in agri-food technologies, given unstable ecological conditions. As a latent historical bloc becomes visible, groups that sustain an inheritance of learning from subaltern experiences have strategies to live through fragmentation and collapse. The dissertation provides an ethnography of the present, and possible future, of agroecology. With an analysis of a latent historical bloc, I take up Gramsci’s concepts to chart strategic ways forward. I suggest that social and political conditions are underway for social groups and organic intellectuals to put new ideologies around agroecology into articulation, while transforming patronage relations. By focusing on growth media, scholarly attention evades the trap of categorising farmers into static categories, and looks, with farmers, at the material and aesthetic relations in a more-than-human world, which sustains human lives.

• Item Type: Theses (Dissertation, LMU Munich)
• Keywords: agroecology, agrarian studies, learning assemblages, rural-urban
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences; 300 Social sciences > 360 Social services, association
• Faculties: Faculty of Cultural Studies
• Language: English
• Date of oral examination: 23. July 2025
• 1. Referee: Rippa, Alessandro
• Signature of the printed copy: 0001/UMC 32040