Milieu of Memory: Reclaiming a Legacy in the Andes
FAIN: FA-55481-10
Virginia Dimasuay Nazarea
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)
Milieu of Memory: Reclaiming a Legacy in the Andes examines the encounter of different worlds as potatoes travel from Andean fields to gene banks and back again with the return of potatoes from the International Potato Center in Lima to the communities of the Potato Park in Cusco, Peru. I follow the translation, commensuration, and clash of concepts in three sites: the international research center, the Peruvian NGO, and the Quechua communities as I trace the nodes and linkages of the repatriation network. Instead of delineating actors and commodities, I will look closely at the blurred genres that are often lost in translation as we cast actors in globalization as victims or villains. We tend to imbue history, structure, and politics with omnipotence and regard 'people without history' (Wolf 1982) as people without memory, or will, as well. More than about potatoes, the book is about the stubborn defense of landscape, identity, and place and how biodiversity inheres in countermemory.