Anthropology • History • Science, Technology, and Society

Alyssa Paredes

Department of Anthropology

University of Michigan

Monday, Feb. 13
4:00PM-5:30PM
Hayden Library,
Nexus 14S-130

Questions? Please email sts-events@mit.edu.

Bananapocalypse: Externalities in the Making of Plantation Capitalism

Plantation regimes and transnational commodity trading confront a serious challenge in the 21st century. For every commodity that travels long-distance chains, there are multiple externalities that are hidden and unaccounted for—not by accident, but by design. Externalities are the social and environmental costs of production that are considered external because they are not accounted for in its calculus nor in the final price of a product, even as they contribute to value creation in uncompensated ways.

What if ethnographers wrote about powerful industries with the assumption that their acts of violence, force, and disregard come from a place of weakness rather than strength, and vulnerability rather than hegemony?