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

本博士论文项目研究的是中亚地区农业起源中心嫁接果树的人际关系，特别是嫁接果树的产权和政治。财产是人类和非人类相互作用的核心，但关于财产的学术研究倾向于强烈地以人类为中心：财产是人们之间关于一件事的关系。大多数关于产权的研究都将非人类（如无生命的物体以及非人类的生物，如树木）描述为被动的和从属的，可以在人类所有者之间移动。但人们对财产制度的控制并不那么明确，人和物也不像这个图式所暗示的那样容易分离。本项目的目的是对吉尔吉斯斯坦核桃林及其周边地区的财产关系进行分析，核桃林是世界上一个相对缺乏研究的地区，具有国际保护和园艺重要性的生态系统。这片森林里的树木，核桃、苹果、李子、樱桃、梨树，在一些地方无人看管地大量生长，但是，通过嫁接的园艺实践，可以变成温带世界各地花园和果园里可靠的居民。自20世纪30年代以来，人类劳动已经将成千上万的嫁接树木散布在整个森林中，在那里，它们比未嫁接的邻居结出更大、更美味、更有价值的果实。本项目采用一系列方法，包括参与观察、访谈、口述历史、文献回顾，以及绘制森林内外嫁接树木的分布地图，通过三个关键问题来解决这些树木在财产制度中的作用：1)在吉尔吉斯斯坦南部的森林和耕地空间中，各种行动者如何拥有和获取物品？2)在吉尔吉斯斯坦核桃林及其周边地区，嫁接是如何进行的？3)森林的园艺潜力如何影响其资源获取的政治？调查人员希望证明嫁接和未嫁接树木的不同行为方式，以及对森林的所有权和使用方式产生的不同后果。通过考虑嫁接树在后苏联财产变化地形上的位置，该项目对政治生态学、科学技术研究、社会理论、人与环境相互作用以及后苏联世界研究等领域具有潜在的影响。这个项目试图将财产制度重新定义为只有通过集体努力才能实现的人和物的成就，而不再是人类作为被动物品分配成果的方式。通过关注嫁接，一种塑造森林景观和人们对其使用的园艺实践，该作品引起了人们对人类与植物之间的亲密互动的关注，这些互动对当地生计和森林的遗传特性产生了物质影响。该项目将证明，小农户担心他们对树木的使用权受到保护利益和其他希望在没有人为干预的情况下保护树木的外部干预的威胁，这既威胁到他们的生计，也威胁到这些树木的维护，这些树木是自然与社会的混合体。计划在美国和吉尔吉斯斯坦通过会议、出版物和报告进行学术和非学术传播。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究生涯。

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.