From Homo economicus to Complex Subjectivities: Reconceptualizing Farmers as Pesticide Users

Abstract

Through empirical analysis and theory, this paper critiques technocratic regimes of protection vis à vis pesticide use, which are efforts limited to technical rationality and didactic communication of pesticide risks that model pesticide users as self‐responsible individuals (ie Homo economicus). Data reveal that knowledge of pesticide risk does not translate into greater protective gear use, within the Costa Rican case presented and more broadly. This circumstance, across first and third world contexts, leads me to develop a more holistic conceptualization of farmers’ subjectivities that highlights numerous constraints—informational, political economic, cultural, individual, and environmental—to which farmers are subject. This conceptualization reveals the inadequacy of most efforts to address farmers’ protective gear use, and leads me to propose a multi‐tiered solution to pesticide problems, including an industrial hygiene approach and fostering subjectivities through participatory research involving pesticide users.

Political Ecologies of Global Health: Pesticide Exposure in Southwestern Ecuador's Banana Industry

“…These entangled ecological and political economic realities suggest additional intervention possibilities such as emancipatory participatory projects involving political ecologists, global health scholars studying environmental injustice, and communities actually experiencing these risks (cf. Galt ). And while the agriculture‐focused case study explored here is somewhat marginal to central foci in global health such as infectious diseases and clinical medicine, work on “internal ecologies” of HIV sufferers in health care settings (Neely ), and on agroecological implications of living with HIV (King ), suggests that ecological entanglements remain relevant in more clinical contexts.…”

“…These same relatively privileged individuals might also invoke more structural, multi-scale explanations of their own problems, suggesting a complex interaction between social locationespecially class-and scale-linked explanations for health and other problems. Individualizing explanations of health problems voiced by Orenses resonate with persistent, but problematic, currents in pesticide-health research, and public and global health more generally (Brisbois 2016;Galt 2013;Guthman and Mansfield 2015;Sparke 2016). Thus attention to competing environmentally linked narratives-a hallmark of political ecology-deepens understanding of how such narratives select for different responses to ecologically entangled global health issues.…”

“…Reflecting this shift, recent conceptual work has begun to break down artificial distinctions between external environments and internal ecologies within human bodies, as illustrated by the epigenetic effects of environmental toxins on gene expression (Guthman and Mansfield ). Such environmental influences on allegedly behaviour‐linked conditions such as obesity challenge moralistic emphases on individual responsibility as a determinant of health, paralleling the governmentality‐focused global health analyses described above (see also Galt [] on how the “complex subjectivities” of pesticide users complicate behavioural pesticide‐safety approaches). Building on such developments and operationalizing insights from medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and the history of medicine, Jackson and Neely (:52) tackle the challenge of “how to do a political ecology of health”.…”

Absolving the sins of emission: The politics of regulating agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand

“…The hostility and contentiousness present during the development of the ETS and the passage of legislation which established the scheme cannot be explained without attending to the conflict between the existing subjectivities of New Zealand farmers and the intentions of the ETS as a governmental programme. Foregrounding farmer subjectivities in the first instance likewise allows for recognition of the contingent nature of subject formation and attention to the array of conditions, contexts, and processes that affect farmers (Galt, 2013). Second, while other studies have examined the politics of carbon markets and their construction (Bailey, 2007;Knox-Hayes, 2010;Bullock, 2012;Paterson, 2012;Stephan and Paterson, 2012), emissions trading markets remain e with the exception of the New Zealand ETS e the domain of states, firms, and finance, rather than individuals.…”

Ecosystem approaches to health and knowledge-to-action: towards a political ecology of applied health-environment knowledge

“…Radical or Freirean approaches are among the most power-conscious participatory techniques, and their focus on linked reflection and action in struggles for liberation -praxis -is highly relevant to the project of engaged or applied scholarship (Freire 2004). Such empowerment-based strategies have been previously highlighted by political ecologists as appropriate responses to inequitable healthenvironment issues, although behavior-change public health approaches represent persistent obstacles to emancipatory political change (Galt 2013). The interaction between community participation and behaviorchange objectives in the EkoSante survey results discussed above shows that ecohealth researchers are confronting such tensions in ways that could be enhanced by engagement with political ecology.…”