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Accepted Paper:

Weather and market price: how has the watermelon cultivation become gambling in the Russian Far East?  
Hyun-Gwi Park (Kyung Hee University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines in what context the unpredictability of weather becomes to represent risk and uncertainty and how people respond to insecurity in cultivation deemed to be caused by the weather by taking an ethnographic example from watermelon cultivation in the periphery of Russia.

Paper long abstract:

Based on long-term ethnographic research among watermelon cultivators in the Russian Far East since the early 2000s, this paper explores how weather has become the central metaphor in describing their economic activities. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the watermelon cultivation was mainly subsistence farming in order to deal with economic turbulence caused by the collapse of the socialist state economy. During this period, the weather was merely one of many factors influencing their harvest. However, from the mid-2000s with accelerated marketization in Russia, the watermelon cultivation became risky business with increased size of cultivation plot. This paper approaches how watermelon cultivators make two correlated uncertainties-weather and market price- in their domestic economy. Facing uncertainty of weather and market price, the cultivators adopt the idiom of gambling to perceive this insecurity. In this worldview, the weather and fluctuation of market prices becomes the basis of the game which creates inter-relatedness among watermelon cultivators across various regions in Russia beyond their village. As Evans-Pritchard argued in the study of Azandes (1976[1937]), what people are most concerned with is understanding and responding to the weather and market price, not scientifically analysing it. I argue that their metaphorical use of gambling for narrating their watermelon cultivation is not only the social interpretation of their work among co-producers of watermelons in the region but also their rhetorical device to reveal the bare bones of neoliberal market economy in contemporary Russia.

Panel P19
Agriculture and Climate Change
  Session 1