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Welcome to soylandia
Welcome to soylandia
Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Andrew Ofstehage calls "flexible farms" that have severed connections with the basic units of agriculture: land, plants, and labor. But while the transnational farmers have destroyed these relationships, they cannot simply do as they please. Regardless of their nationality, race, and capital, they must contend with pests, workers, the Brazilian state, and the land itself.
Welcome to Soylandia explores the frictions that define the new relationships of flexible farming—a paradigm that Ofstehage shows is ready to be reproduced elsewhere in Brazil and exported to the rest of the globe, including the United States. Through this compelling ethnography, Ofstehage takes readers on a tour of Soylandia and the new world of industrial agriculture, globalized markets, international development, and environmental change that it heralds.
Praise for Welcome to Soylandia:
Only partially a place, 'Soylandia' is also a powerful concept related to migration, dystopian world-making, capital, and alienation, wrought through human-environment relations. Welcome to Soylandia integrates extensive fieldwork, archival research, and analysis in its narrative of US farmers whose unsustainable pursuits open up questions about the logic and limits of capital.
Dana E. Powell, author of Landscapes of Power
Andrew Ofstehage tells the stories of the US farmers who are trying their luck in Brazil with ethnographic clarity and immersive detail. With lively descriptions of the challenges, achievements, and failures of farmers in Brazil's Cerrado, Welcome to Soylandia makes significant contributions to the anthropology of agriculture and economic anthropology in general.
Daniel Reichman, author of Progress in the Balance
"a noção de “Soylandia” constitui uma contribuição analítica relevante para compreender como a circulação transnacional desse modelo produtivo opera por meio de assimetrias de poder, naturalizando formas específicas de uso da terra, do trabalho e do território"
- Marina Salgado
"A timely contribution to the anthropology of agriculture and environmental anthropology more broadly, Welcome to Soylandia offers a compelling picture of masculinity and the lives of transnational farmers, as well as the mechanisms and dimensions through which advanced industrialisation in agriculture transforms agrarian landscapes and communities in late capitalist Brazil."
- Elena-Daniela Ana
"With Soylandia, Ofstehage makes a valuable contribution to the anthropology of farming—delving into the daily lived experiences of how food is produced, land cultivated, and labor organized—by exploring its political, economic, social, cultural, ecological, and symbolic dimensions."
- Joost Jongerden
"It challenges us to think about how global agricultural crises are exported, how landscapes are reshaped by migration, and how identities are reproduced abroad."
- Mariana Galvao Lyra
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