Health as growth

Abstract

What notions of health and proper nutrition are articulated in the use and promotion of agricultural biotechnology in the global South? What future trajectories for health do they envision? Experiments with genetically modified bananas in Uganda use the fruit as a vehicle to achieve public health goals. This work in plant science understands itself as humanitarian, drawing on specific notions of health and its opposite: the deficient health of humans and plants. Instead of thinking about improved health through bananas, which implies an instrumental relationship to plants, I connect this high-tech effort to a way of thinking with the banana plant in central Uganda that highlights the entanglement of human and plant growth. Expanding our thinking about health with plants and the gardens where they grow relocates the production of health to sites that still seldom figure in medical anthropology and helps reconceptualize what one takes growth to be and what relations can sustain crossspecies thriving.

On bundling: the aesthetics of exchange and growth in central Uganda

“…The banana, in turn, provides a template through which personal and collective growth was and often still is imagined (Calkins 2019; Karugaba 1999). This is connected to the overall importance of the idiom of growth in Buganda.…”

“…Rather, the concern is with a compositional logic (Guyer and Belinga 1995) in which persons and things are bound or bundled together. Although the importance of banana gardens for ‘building oneself’ ( okwezimba ) has declined for many people, especially in urban settings, these gardens remain the template for imagining normative home and family arrangements (Calkins 2019). Moreover, pursuing personal growth often continues to require forging relationships with wealthier and better-connected patrons, including in the course of urban market practices (Monteith 2018).…”

The Substitute and the Excuse

“…This engendered a biochemical modernity “in which matter moves differently” (Landecker 2023, 79). Sandra Calkins (2019) shows how bananas in Uganda offer a distinct conceptualization of growth's relationship with health. Timothy Mitchell's (2011) analysis of carbon democracy illuminates oil as a material of growth engendering specific governance and epistemology.…”

Between the Lab and the Field: Plants and the Affective Atmospheres of Southern Science

“…It is in and of itself interesting to devote attention to plants—beings that are so different from us, that are rooted in a place and often backgrounded in human life. This project in molecular biology allows conceiving banana plants—plants about which there is a rich archive of thought in Uganda—with great complexity, sensitivity, and nuance, as beings that often have to bend to human ideas yet still pursue their own projects in the world (Marder 2013; Calkins 2019). Theoretically plants confound the scientific framing; as “metaphysical weeds” they grow in between and blur established categories of field and lab, of person and thing (Marder 2013: 90).…”

“… 7. In Uganda, matooke are ubiquitous and familiar plants that denote vitality, fertility, and cross-generational connection (Calkins 2019). Matooke has been a staple food the Great Lakes region for many centuries; it was cultivated by women, freeing men to do politics and raid their neighbors (Schoenbrun 1998, 79-84; Stephens 2013).…”