“There Are No Seeds Here”: Severing Seed Sovereignty in Mae La Refugee Camp

Dr. Terese Gagnon, a post-doctoral fellow with the Bringing Southeast Asia Home project and housed in the Department of Anthropology, will give the first UNC Anthropology Colloquium of the year.

In this talk I illustrate the ways in which the process of becoming refugees in Mae La refugee camp, technically a “temporary shelter”, severs Indigenous seed sovereignty and inter-generational agricultural memory for forcibly displaced Karen people. This severing occurs in the camp in large part through agricultural forgetting: the process by which linkages between people and plants are broken generationally. Along with dispossession and exile, such enforced forgetting is facilitated by the enclosure of the commons and commercialization. I argue that agricultural forgetting emerges in especially forceful ways in the camp, where the ruptures caused by displacement clear the slate for new more-than-human social arrangements. Such an account of agriculture in the camp is a necessary corrective to upbeat discourses of livelihoods programs promoting refugee ‘self-reliance’. This is because livelihoods programs and their discourse of self-reliance in the context of closed encampment obscure the enforced forgetting taking place across generations in this space of exception.