ABSTRACT

Examining the literature of activist groups and the reports and webpages of development NGOs, this chapter explores how the heritage binaries help to construct a rather different conception of guardianship. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the arborescences and rhizomes have often been used to theorise protest movements and institutional modes of organisation. Activist groups or networks tend to take a rhizomic form, not strongly hierarchical or unified. Sometimes texts describe a generalised attacker in the form of industrial farming, transnational corporations or capitalism. Activist heritage vegetable discourse tackles these issues using quite a lot of the language of warfare, but the two sides are not described using the same kind of words. Corporate strategies are described using the language of criminality too, including ‘biopiracy’, ‘gene-jacking’, theft, looting, marauding and plundering. The binaries that characterise and delineate food, plants and seeds (heritage versus industrial) are also applied to the people connected with them.