Infrastructuring ‘Red Gold’: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s Raspberry Country

0584607 - EÚ 2024 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Thiemann, André
Infrastructuring ‘Red Gold’: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s Raspberry Country.
Ethnos. Roč. 89, č. 2 (2024), s. 289-311. ISSN 0014-1844. E-ISSN 1469-588X
Institutional support: RVO:68378076
Keywords : Agronomics * cold chain * food * infrastructural involution * Serbia * value
OECD category: Antropology, ethnology
Impact factor: 1.3, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00141844.2022.2163271

Serbia has exported raspberries since socialism. Its production network withstood the post-Yugoslav property transformations and grew despite global competition. This article traces the configuration of the ‘infrastructures of value’ that underwrite the raspberries’ spatio-temporal reach to distant markets. Combining new and historical materialism, it contributes to economic anthropology by studying the interplay between two infrastructures – agronomics and the ‘cold chain’ – and their
differential weathering of historical transformations. During socialism, the agronomists infrastructured’ the environment in collaboration with farmers and plants, while the containment technologists upgraded the freezing infrastructure, solidifying the fruits into graded, storable, and transportable commodities. After socialism, private entrepreneurs replicated the cold-chain modules, while agronomic research and quality control became de-institutionalised. As the agronomic infrastructure stagnated, the cold chain went into overdrive. In this latecapitalist ‘infrastructural involution’, political-economic transformations reshaped multispecies infrastructures, devaluing the contributions of plants and rural labour while benefiting entrepreneurs and wholesalers.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0352533