Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics

by Kristina M. Lyons

In Colombia, decades of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs have created a seemingly untenable situation for scientists and rural communities as they attempt to care for forests and grow non-illicit crops. In Vital Decomposition Kristina M. Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations. She follows state soil scientists and peasants across labs, greenhouses, forests, and farms and attends to the struggles and collaborations between farmers, agrarian movements, state officials, and scientists over the meanings of peace, productivity, rural development, and sustainability in Colombia. In particular, Lyons examines the practices and philosophies of rural farmers who value the decomposing layers of leaves, which make the soils that sustain life in the Amazon, and shows how the study and stewardship of the soil point to alternative frameworks for living and dying. In outlining the life-making processes that compose and decompose into soil, Lyons theorizes how life can thrive in the face of the violence, criminalization, and poisoning produced by militarized, growth-oriented development.

Genres: Environment

232 pages, Hardcover

Published April 17, 2020

Reviews

[Sam Love · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. Some of the ideas in in the book I found most generative were: the concept of the “selva” as a relational set of practices and cycles of life and death, her troubling of soil as usually understood to be stable and scientifically categorized, the centering of Heraldo and the ways in Lyons envisions him as a research partner and agent and originator of theoretical perspectives, the ways in which the decomposing litter layers (the horjarasca) disrupt how we think about soil and life, the role and consequences of scientific ‘experts’ in soil classification and management especially in tandem with the state, what Rob Nixon might call the ‘slow violence’ of US antidrug policy and aerial chemical sprays but also a longer history of colonial and capitalist knowledges and practices, and her attention to resistance, politics, and reclamation. I especially loved her section on criollo seeds in Chapter 4 and her troubling of seeing discrete forms of life and non-life as evidenced by the soil but also memorably by Heraldo's hands infected with a fungus. Soils, as Lyons point out, challenge the dominant biological understandings of what life itself is, with soils being very much alive and composed of both organisms and minerals and “non-living” things, but nonetheless very much changing and transforming constantly.

[elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyons asks in what ways human-soil relations take on political importance in Colombia. She draws on feminist and postcolonial science studies and anthropology, and emphasises farmers' struggles to resist commodification. She does not simply oppose classical soil science, perceiving soils as nutritive substrates for crops to the integrative principles of agroecology, but tries instead to capture how both scientists and rural communities “negotiate the boundaries of science and propel their knowledge and practices into political life” (2020: 6), all of this happening on the backdrop of a long-term state of war in Colombia (until the 2016 peace agreements). Her long-term fieldwork occurred before the peace agreements, between 2008-2011 and 2013-2014. I read that the book was translated into Spanish, a great endeavour to make ethnography available to the interlocutors and the studied region in general. I find many themes in the book extremely interesting and I find "ecopoetic" texts attractive, but this book in particular was often difficult to follow. 3.5

[Cana McGhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

while the fragmenty structure mirrors the precarity of soil politics, food production, and economic autonomy in columbia, i did find the flow a little tricky to follow at times. but: one will appreciate lyons’s focus on campesino and rural farmers’ knowledge and stories, especially considering the book’s thinly veiled critique of colonial scientific practices in the region. while not quite what i initially expected, my copy returns to my shelf covered with underlining, as a testament to the book’s thought-provoking and perspective-shifting nature. (3.5/5)

[Cruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyons presents an intriguing story of the intersection of imperialism, capitalism, and soil in the Colombian Amazon by amplifying the voices of those fighting for a decolonized form of agriculture. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Amazon, Colombia, and agricultural policy.

[copper_lattice]

An exceptional and poetic investigation into the relationship between soil health, lifework, international solidarity, violence, and regeneration.

[Ellie Botoman · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5