Dall’antropologia politica all’antropologia dell’agricoltura, e ritorno: una introduzione

Agriculture accompanies the so-called 'birth of civilisation', marking the human history of the last millennia. The anthropology of agriculture is to be seen as closely intertwined with all other anthropologies, but especially with political anthropology. In the current configuration of the world, a post-global world, political processes in fact profoundly determine the processes of production, distribution and consumption; this is all the more evident in a primary sector such as agriculture, now subject to the imperatives of the financial economy. The outcomes of agricultural activities, argues the author, no longer depend on the activities of the social actors engaged in production and their interaction with the climate, but on the strategic decisions of the great financial co-conspirators, such as today's transnational holdings and multinational corporations, now engaged in the geometrically progressive accumulation of capital, an accumulation that is parallel to the processes of desertification of the world-of-life. Agricultural anthropology thus allows the unravelling of the relationship between the past, present and future of societies, i.e. the relationship between man and his Being there.