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

这篇博士论文研究了中亚嫁接果树的人与人的关系，特别是这种嫁接果树的产权和政治问题。财产是人类和非人类相互作用的中心，但关于财产的学术倾向于强烈地以人类为中心：财产是人与人之间关于一件事的关系。大多数关于财产权的研究将非人类(如无生命的物体以及树木等非人类生物)描述为被动的和从属的，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开。该项目的目的是对吉尔吉斯斯坦核桃-果林及其周围的财产关系进行分析，这是一个在世界上相对研究较少的地区具有国际保护和园艺重要性的生态系统。这片森林的树木，核桃、苹果、李子、樱桃、梨树，在一些地方长得很茂盛，但通过嫁接的园艺实践，可以变成温带世界各地花园和果园中可靠的居民。自20世纪30年代以来，人类的劳动使数千棵嫁接的树木散落在森林中，它们比未嫁接的邻居结出更大、更美味、更有价值的果实。该项目使用一系列方法，包括参与者观察、访谈、口述历史、文件回顾和绘制嫁接树木在森林及其周围的分布图，通过三个关键问题探讨这些树木在财产制度中的作用：1)吉尔吉斯斯坦南部森林和耕种空间中的各种行为者如何拥有和使用物品？2)吉尔吉斯斯坦核桃-果林及其周围的嫁接工作如何？3)森林的园艺潜力如何影响获取其资源的政治？研究人员希望展示嫁接和未嫁接树木的行为方式不同，并对森林的所有权和使用权产生不同的后果。通过考虑嫁接树在后苏联财产不断变化的地形上的位置，该项目对政治生态、科学技术研究、社会理论、人与环境的互动以及后苏联世界的研究领域具有潜在的影响。该项目试图将财产制度重新构建为人和事物的成就，只能通过他们的集体努力才能实现，而不再是人类作为被动物品分配果实的方式。通过专注于嫁接，一种塑造森林景观和人们对其使用的园艺实践，这项工作引起了人们对人与植物之间的亲密互动的关注，这对当地的生计和森林的遗传特性产生了物质影响。该项目将表明，小农担心他们获得树木的权利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，也威胁到作为自然-社会杂交种的树木的维护。包括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的计划。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.