Mapped Encounters
Histories, geographies, cartographies, ecologies, varieties, species, genotypes, environments, conditions, disturbances, vulnerabilities, abilities, scales, structures, flows, contingencies, industries, technologies, materialities, socialities, temporalities, spatialities, globalities, localities, generalities, particularities, sensorialities, experiences, settings and beings. This broadly specified listing of sorts — simultaneously entangled and demarcated as assembled — could be furthered, widened, segmented and connected. Matter of fact, it could go on and on, be evermore detailed and abstracted, concretized and theorized, unfolded and wrapped together, for the collection of mapped matters pertaining to my fieldwork occur curiously complex, yet meaningfully identifiable in its diverse set of categorically catalogued mappings; those related to my own sorting-out-while-connecting mode of thinking through fieldwork experiences, as well as those relating to the practices and processes of olive cultivation and olive oil production that my research explores.
I am five weeks in conducting fieldwork and I have thus far, expectantly, encountered a variety of experiences evoking a range of questions, wonders, curiosities, and feelings in me. Some appear more particular in concern and others more general; some more directly linked to my research and others more triggering in kind. All vibrantly ensued though. Consider for instance the intriguing occurrence of an olive plant, hundreds of years in age, being walled in. So many questions set off by it, an explosion of wonders really, putting a whole train of thoughts in motion. For starters, the sight of the plant growing part of the bricked assemblage got me wonder about practices of mapping in general, that of making territories in particular. Wondering about the at once material–conceptual phenomena of borders activated reflections concerning certain labeling practices inherent to the agrobusiness of olive oil production, such as that of Protected Denomination of Origin (DOP) and Indicazione Geografica Protetta (IGP). This, in turn, prompted considerations on how such certificates impact and reinforce ideas about nationalism, regionalism, patrimonies, identities, legacies and narratives—all of which plays part in the cultivation, let alone commodification, of Apulian olive oil. Domino effect. Big time. Did not stop there. Nope. Catalyzing as the experience appeared, it reminded me of a book I read a while back on the scientific classification and collection of Italian olive germplasm (Muzzalupo 2012), and just like that, mobilized were contemplations of how situated branches of knowledge bound material practices into social structures (Lien and Law 2011: 68).
One encounter, several affects. Plentiful like it. None appear the same, but all comparable in the sense that things materialize correlational in their occurring; for me in my role as researcher, also correlationally thought about. My wall of post-it noted color sheets hints the correlational and meaningfully identifiable character of mapped practices. It also hints ways in which a food product such as olive oil, which occur mundane for many people around the globe, may act as window to thinking about human–environment interactions; particular and more general in kind, local and global in scale. It, the food product acting as a window of sorts that is, epitomizes the manifold ways in which a thing occurs on so many levels, in so many respects, through so many dynamics, from so many perspectives, and by means of so many correlated matters. Some of which I am currently in the process of mapping. Some of which I will detail in posts to come. Most of which I never will be capable to fully grapple with. Many of which I will attempt to ethnographically contextualize and anthropologically analyze.
References
Lien, Marianne E., and Law, John. 2011. ‘Emergent Aliens’: On Salmon, Nature, and Their Enactment. Ethnos 76 (1): 65-87. Doi: 10.1080/00141844.2010.549946.
Muzzalupo, Innocenzo. 2012. Olive Germplasm — Italian Catalogue of Olive Varieties. London: IntechOpen Ltd. Doi: 10.557/51719.
