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

博士论文研究：制作混合财产：吉尔吉斯斯坦核桃果林中的人、树和嫁接

• 批准号: 1203103
• 负责人: Matthew Turner
• 金额: $ 0.91万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-06-15 至 2013-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1203103&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Making; Hybrid

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.

该博士学位论文项目考虑了与中亚树木的农业起源中心的人际关系，尤其是财产权利和嫁接果树的政治。财产对于人类和非人类的相互作用至关重要，但是关于财产的奖学金往往强烈以人类为中心：财产是人们与事物的关系。大多数关于财产权利的研究代表非人类（例如，无生命的物体以及树木等非人类生物），例如被动和下属，在人所有者之间被移动。但是，人们并不是那么清楚地控制财产制度，人们和事物也没有像该模式所暗示的那样容易分离。该项目的目的是对吉尔吉斯斯坦核桃果森林及其周围的财产关系进行分析，这是国际保护和园艺重要性的生态系统。这种森林，胡桃木，苹果，李子，樱桃，梨的树木在某些地方不断生长，但是，通过嫁接的园艺实践，可以转变为在温带世界周围的花园和果园中发现的可靠居民。自1930年代以来，人工劳动分散了数千棵嫁接的树木，在整个森林中，它们比没有养邻居更大，更美味，更有价值的水果。使用一套方法，包括参与者观察，访谈，口述历史，文档审查以及森林内和周围嫁接树的分布的映射，该项目通过三个关键问题解决了这些树木在物业制度中的作用：1）如何在吉里吉斯坦南部的森林和培养空间中拥有和访问各个行为者？ 2）嫁接在吉尔吉斯斯坦的核桃果森林中如何工作？ 3）森林的园艺潜力如何影响获得其资源的政治？调查人员希望证明嫁接和未植物的树木的作用不同，并且对森林的拥有和进入的方式产生了不同的影响。通过考虑嫁接树在后苏联财产不断变化的地形上的地位，该项目对政治生态学，科学和技术研究，社会理论，人类环境的互动以及对后苏联世界的研究具有潜在的影响 项目。通过关注嫁接，一种塑造森林景观和人们对其的园艺实践，这项工作引起人们对人类与植物之间的紧密相互作用的关注，对局部生计和森林的遗传认同具有物质影响。该项目将表明，小农户担心他们对树木的获取权受到保护利益和其他外源性干预措施的威胁，这些干预措施希望在不进行人类干预的情况下进行保护，并威胁着它们的生计以及维护自然社会杂种的树木。包括在美国以及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计划。 作为博士学位论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生能够建立强大的独立研究职业。