This doctoral dissertation project considers the human relations with and especially property right and politics of grafted fruit trees in a center of agricultural origin for such trees in Central Asia. Property is central to the interactions of humans and nonhumans, but scholarship on property tends to be strongly anthropocentric: property is a relationship among people about a thing. Most research on property rights represent nonhumans (e.g. inanimate objects as well as non-human living beings such as trees) as passive and subordinate, to be moved among human owners. But people are not so clearly in control of property regimes, nor are people and things so easily separated as this schema suggests. The objective of this project is to provide an analysis of property relationships in and around Kyrgyzstan's walnut-fruit forest, an ecosystem of international conservation and horticultural importance in a relatively understudied part of the world. The trees of this forest, walnut, apple, plum, cherry, pear, grow in untended profusion in some places, but, through the horticultural practice of grafting, can be transformed into the dependable inhabitants found in gardens and orchards around the temperate world. Since the 1930s human labor has scattered thousands of grafted trees throughout the forest, where they bear bigger, tastier, and more valuable fruit than their ungrafted neighbors. Using a suite of methods including participant observation, interviews, oral histories, document review, and the mapping of the distribution of grafted trees in and around the forest, this project addresses the role of these trees in property regimes through three key questions: 1) How are things owned and accessed by various actors in the forested and cultivated spaces of southern Kyrgyzstan? 2) How does grafting work in and around Kyrgyzstan's walnut-fruit forests? 3) How does the horticultural potential of the forest affect the politics of access to its resources? The investigators expect to demonstrate the ways in which grafted and ungrafted trees act differently, and with different consequences for how the forest is owned and accessed. By considering the place of the grafted tree on the shifting terrain of post-Soviet property, this project has potential implications for the fields of political ecology, science and technology studies, social theory, human-environment interactions, and research on the post-Soviet world.
This project seeks to reframe property institutions as accomplishments of people and things, only achievable through their collective efforts, and no longer as ways for humans to distribute the fruits as passive items. By focusing on grafting, a horticultural practice that shapes the forested landscape and people's use of it, this work draws attention to an intimate interaction between humans and plants with material effects on local livelihoods and the genetic identity of the forest. The project will demonstrate that smallholder concerns that their access rights to the trees are threatened by conservation interests and other exogenous interventions that wish to conserve them without human intervention, threatens both their livelihood as well as the maintenance of the trees which are nature-society hybrids. Plans for academic and non-academic dissemination via conferences, publications and reports in the US as well as in Kyrgyzstan are included. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
This project explores the horticultural technique of grafting, a collaboration of human and tree dependent on the capacities of each, and the role of the grafted tree in how people interact with the walnut-fruit forests of southern Kyrgyzstan. The trees of this forest—walnut, apple, plum, cherry, pear—grow in untended profusion in some places, but can be transformed through grafting into the dependable inhabitants we find in gardens and orchards around the temperate world. Human labor since the 1930s has scattered thousands of grafted trees throughout the forest, where they bear bigger, tastier, more valuable fruit than their ungrafted neighbors. The project addresses the role of these trees in property regimes through three key questions: 1) How are things owned and accessed by human and nonhuman actors in the forested and cultivated spaces of southern Kyrgyzstan? 2) How does grafting work in and around southern Kyrgyzstan’s walnut-fruit forests? 3) How does the horticultural potential of the forest affect the politics of access to its resources? Using interviews, surveys, ethnographic techniques, and GIS, we have demonstrated the ways in which grafted and ungrafted trees act differently, and the ways in which different groups of people interact with their variously-modified tree neighbors. We have explored the consequences of grafting, in the past and the present, for how the forest is owned and accessed today. The intellectual merit of our work lies in its reframing of property institutions not as ways for humans to dole out the fruits of a passive material terrain but instead as accomplishments of people and things, only achievable through their collective efforts. By focusing on grafting, a horticultural practice that shapes the forested landscape and people’s use of it, this work draws attention to an intimate interaction between human and plant with material effects on local livelihoods and the genetic nature of the forest. In considering the place of the grafted tree on the shifting terrain of post-Soviet property, this project has potential implications for political ecology, science and technology studies, social theory and theoretical work on human-environment interactions, and research on the post-Soviet world. Our work has broader impacts as well. Our analysis of property relationships revolves around Kyrgyzstan’s walnut-fruit forest, an ecosystem of international conservation and horticultural importance. By describing the relationships between the walnut-fruit forest and underrepresented populations of rural Kyrgyzstanis, and by focusing on the creative labors of one skillful group of horticulturists, we help empower local communities and raise awareness about rural Central Asia, a relatively understudied part of the world.
