ABSTRACT

Whereas this volume explores the material culture of food, or ‘food stuffs’, in order to extend existing dialogues about the materiality of food itself, this chapter seeks to approach foodstuffs at a more elemental level by examining the materiality of agricultural systems, treating food and non-food plants themselves as material objects. In order to do this, this chapter explores permaculture, a fairly new approach to agricultural production in which the ‘intra-action’ (Barad 2003) between food and non-food plants is taken as the key factor in successful growing. Based on ethnographic research conducted at ecovillages in West Wales, this chapter shows how permaculture’s methodology transcends positivism, focusing instead on the relationality of substances in order to craft radical, more than human (Whatmore 2002) ecologies. It may be argued in that case, that permaculture represents a transformation in both the social and material practices that comprise agricultural production, yet a more promising analysis using the new materialist literatures will focus on the material agencies that the permaculture approach to food production is concerned with. This chapter argues that the permacultural focus on material agency in the context of agricultural production directly addresses the relationship between the material details of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures (Coole and Frost 2010). As such, it is argued that the New Materialisms can inform an anthropological understanding of permaculture practice as a sustainable and materially-engaged foodway.