Agricultural Modernities in Latin America: Historical Intersections

Thursday 19 June

ETH Main Building, Rämistrasse 101, Zurich. Room: ETH HG E24

14:00

Introduction

14:15 – 15:45

Panel: Economics and Nation-Building

• Tomás Bartoletti, ETH Zurich:
  «Piojos and Picudos in the Peruvian Pampas: 
  New Empires of Cotton and the Gospel of Pest Control, 
  c. 1910-1930»
• Paula Vedovelli, Fundação Getulio Vargas:
  «Knowing at a Distance and Intimate Knowledge: 
  Foreign Trade Performance, Graphical Representations, and the Emergence of Modern Agricultural Nations in Argentina and Brazil in the 1910s»

Break

16:10 – 17:40

Panel: Frontiers and Ecosystems

• Sandro Dutra e Silva, Universidade Estadual de Goiás:
  «Crops, Ecology, and Agricultural Modernity: 
  The Historical Role of Soybeans in the Development Policies of the Brazilian Cerrado»
• Viridiana Hernández Fernández, University of Iowa:
  «Guacamole Ecosystems»

18:00 – 19:30

Keynote 
The Green Revolution in the Greater Caribbean and the Peculiarities of Agricultural Modernization in Socialist Cuba

by Reinaldo Funes Monzote, University of Havana

Friday 20 June

ETH IFW Building, Haldeneggsteig 4, Zurich. Room: ETH IFW E42

09:00 – 10:30

Panel: Multispecies Worlds

• John Soluri, Carnegie Mellon University
  «Modernity’s Animals: Guanacos, Hunters/Foragers, and Livestock in Patagonia»
• Thomas Rath, University College London:
  «Latin America and the International ‘Atomic War on Insects’, 1960s-70s»

Break

11:00 – 12:30

Panel: Food and the Nutrition Problem

• Wilson Picado-Umaña, National University of Costa Rica:
  «An Environmental History of Protein in Central America During the Cold War»
• Melina Teubner, University of Bern
  «Feeding the Nation: The Role of Chicken in Transforming Paraguayan Agriculture since the 1990s»

Lunch

14:00 – 15:30

Panel: Indigenous and Peasant Agencies and the Land Question

• Christian Büschges, University of Bern
  «Turning Land into Capital: Historical Conjunctures of the (Re-)Production of Wealth in Latin America from the 19th to the 21st Century»
• Damian Clavel, University of Zurich
  «Banking on Resistance: A Financial History of Araucanía, 1860s-1870s»

Break

16:00 – 16:45

• Diana Alejandra Méndez Rojas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
  «Democracy, Peasant Movements, and Climate Change in Mexico, 1959-2011»

16:45 – 18:00

Final Discussion

This conference is generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the Ambizione project «Insect Pests and Economic Entomology in Plantations, c. 1870–1930s: A Multispecies History of Global Capitalism», led by Dr. Tomás Bartoletti and supported by the Professorship for the History of the Modern World in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Switzerland.