Plantation Peripheries: The Multiple Makings of Asia's Banana Republic

This dissertation, entitled Plantation Peripheries: The Multiple Makings of Asia’s Banana Republic, investigates the interplay between externalized costs and surplus value in the production of a globally beloved and prototypically cheap commodity, the banana. Based on 24 months of immersive ethnographic research, it tracks the dramatic shifts that occur between the Southern Philippine region of Mindanao, where export bananas are among the most resource-intensive of all agricultural industries, to Japanese urban centers in Tokyo and Fukuoka, where they are ubiquitous supermarket staples that sell for cheap. Like all long-distance traders, Filipino exporters and their Japanese importers rely on the strategies of supply chain management to promote predictability, contain disruptions, and orchestrate alignment between institutions. While their notions of the supply chain render the commodity as a singular and static object, this dissertation argues that understanding how human and environmental externalities become sources of capital accumulation demands an approach that sees any given commodity as fundamentally multiple and shape-shifting. Fieldwork for this research revealed that the conventions of crop science, toxic chemical regulatory paradigms, market segmentation techniques, and food quality standards are overlooked arenas where actors contend over what should and what should not be considered a part of the commodity chain’s production calculus. This dissertation therefore chronicles how local actors on the plantation’s periphery and the market’s margins reinsert themselves into the very calculations that efface them. It is composed of six chapters, each of which is organized around two conceptual poles: (1) aboveground and belowground, (2) air and body, (3) taste and topography, (4) aesthetics and logistics, (5) object and idea, and (6) consumer and producer.