Farmer–Filmmakers, Fieldwork, and Growth

This article studies two highly unusual experiments in going back to the land in the 1970s to consider how definitions of growth might be freed from the financialized metrics of extractive capitalism. The article is written around photographs of farmer-filmmaker collectives in Japan and Mali, in which parallel stories of soil and celluloid serve as a visual seedbank of ideas. With a framework that understands growth in terms of ecological and social flourishing, the back-to-the-land experiences in post-colonial West Africa and boom-time Japan appear both distinct and linked, offering timely insight into what Anna Tsing describes as the possibilities for collaborative survival on the edges of capitalism. The article reads the groups’ long-term fieldwork as a material and discursive fortification against the Plantationocene, an age of colonial and neo-colonial violence against land, communities, and ecosystems.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!