Event

Japan is the only place in the world where bananas are marketed and priced by cultivation altitude. In the late 1980’s, plantation managers sourcing the fruit from the southern Philippine region of Mindanao discovered a paradigm-shifting formula: the higher up one grew, the sweeter the bananas became. And the sweeter the bananas were, the closer they were to replicating the sweetness of colonial Taiwanese bananas, a taste lost in the switch to Philippine supply. This talk offers the first transnational history of the banana’s transition along the spectrum from a fungible commodity to a nonfungible product in the Asia-Pacific region.

Engaging critical studies of commodities and plantations, it takes fungibility as the characteristic that makes goods interchangeable and as the principle that renders landscape and labor as empty vessels open to the projection of others’ desires. The talk argues that the introduction of kōchi saibai banana or “highland cultivated bananas” for the Japanese market brought not the reversal of fungible life to the Philippine highlands but rather its continuation. In so doing, this work critiques conceptual frameworks that understand fungibility through the idioms of liquidification and immateriality. Instead, it proposes a topographical approach, which sees processes of fungibilization as operating through the profoundly material rearrangement of human and environmental communities. By focusing on the tensions between fungibility and differentiation, this talk offers an account both of an idiosyncratic marketing strategy particular to Japan and the Philippines, and of a dynamic that pervades the creation of all commodities under capitalism.

Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is an environmental and economic anthropologist researching plantation agriculture, transnational trade, and social justice activism between the Philippines and Japan. Her work appears in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, the Journal of Political Ecology, Gastronomica, and Food, Culture & Society, as well as in the edited collections The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020). She holds a PhD with distinction from Yale University.