Mexico

Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill diverges from most of our previous forays into commodities history. Laveaga profoundly grounds us in the local whilst simultaneously exploring the outside agents effecting broad change. This is really one of the first works to delve into local politics of commodity production. That is to say, this story is about Mexicans and Mexico, and, moreover, about cultural evolution. As Kent noted very well in his post, boiled down further, this work centers on the core of people interacting with the gathering, trade, and refinement processes of barbasco. In essence, Laveaga synthesizes multiple analyses (scientific development, politics, and development) to offer a multi-perspective view of Mexican life throughout this period.

Analogous to what Appadurai and his co-authors proffered in The Social Life of Things, Laveaga’s work demonstrates the existence of a clear “life-cycle” for barbasco. That is to say, she illustrates the evolving uses, desires, and needs attached to an obscure Mexican yam. Jungle Laboratories is effectively presented as an arch: barbasco beings its life as an insignificant jungle legume, then scientific discoveries give it purpose, then it becomes a sought after resource, a replacement is found, and finally it returns to its past obscurity as a jungle root.

Overall, this work reintroduced me to Appadurai’s line of thinking. That is to say, Laveaga effectively shows how human interaction with thingies can dramatically impact cultural evolution; and, further, how investigating these thingies can yield the nuances of cultural evolution.