Doctoral Dissertation Research: Making Hybrid Property: People, Trees, and Grafting in the Walnut-Fruit Forests of Kyrgyzstan

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This doctoral dissertation project considers the human relations with and especially property right and politics of grafted fruit trees in a center of agricultural origin for such trees in Central Asia. Property is central to the interactions of humans and nonhumans, but scholarship on property tends to be strongly anthropocentric: property is a relationship among people about a thing. Most research on property rights represent nonhumans (e.g. inanimate objects as well as non-human living beings such as trees) as passive and subordinate, to be moved among human owners. But people are not so clearly in control of property regimes, nor are people and things so easily separated as this schema suggests. The objective of this project is to provide an analysis of property relationships in and around Kyrgyzstan's walnut-fruit forest, an ecosystem of international conservation and horticultural importance in a relatively understudied part of the world. The trees of this forest, walnut, apple, plum, cherry, pear, grow in untended profusion in some places, but, through the horticultural practice of grafting, can be transformed into the dependable inhabitants found in gardens and orchards around the temperate world. Since the 1930s human labor has scattered thousands of grafted trees throughout the forest, where they bear bigger, tastier, and more valuable fruit than their ungrafted neighbors. Using a suite of methods including participant observation, interviews, oral histories, document review, and the mapping of the distribution of grafted trees in and around the forest, this project addresses the role of these trees in property regimes through three key questions: 1) How are things owned and accessed by various actors in the forested and cultivated spaces of southern Kyrgyzstan? 2) How does grafting work in and around Kyrgyzstan's walnut-fruit forests? 3) How does the horticultural potential of the forest affect the politics of access to its resources? The investigators expect to demonstrate the ways in which grafted and ungrafted trees act differently, and with different consequences for how the forest is owned and accessed. By considering the place of the grafted tree on the shifting terrain of post-Soviet property, this project has potential implications for the fields of political ecology, science and technology studies, social theory, human-environment interactions, and research on the post-Soviet world.This project seeks to reframe property institutions as accomplishments of people and things, only achievable through their collective efforts, and no longer as ways for humans to distribute the fruits as passive items. By focusing on grafting, a horticultural practice that shapes the forested landscape and people's use of it, this work draws attention to an intimate interaction between humans and plants with material effects on local livelihoods and the genetic identity of the forest. The project will demonstrate that smallholder concerns that their access rights to the trees are threatened by conservation interests and other exogenous interventions that wish to conserve them without human intervention, threatens both their livelihood as well as the maintenance of the trees which are nature-society hybrids. Plans for academic and non-academic dissemination via conferences, publications and reports in the US as well as in Kyrgyzstan are included. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.