Revista Colombiana de Sociología (Jul 2016)
Biopower, Development and Diet in El Rosal, Cauca (Colombia)
Abstract
This paper focuses on the concepts of biopower, governmentality, and development in order to analyze an agrofood intervention program in a rural locality in the southern Colombian Andes (El Rosal, Cauca). Through the use of a methodology that links document analysis, local discourses, and agrofood start-up programs, the ways that biopolitical projections operate with regard to nutrition and food in specific contexts were illuminated. After reviewing several investigations on the theme of biopower in food practices, the relationship between the implementation of food policies on a local level and discourses about food and nutrition produced on a global level were clarified. An example is the attempt to transform the agrofood practices in El Rosal through the implementation of a departmental program centered on the cultivation and consumption of quinua (Chenopodium quinoa), a food considered to be ancestral and of great nutritional value. In order to observe this first-hand, various visits to El Rosal were undertaken during 2008, 2009 and 2010. These were complemented with archival work and interviews with central stakeholders from local institutions, municipalities and departments. The results allow us to show, on the one hand, space-specific biopolitical interventions such as the kitchen garden, the cafeteria, and other pedagogical spaces of the local school; and, on the other hand, the processes of construction of subjects who possess and repeat agrofood practices and discourses considered to be acceptable in an expert framing of knowledge. Likewise, we show the contradiction between the incorporation of agrofood knowledge and those practices considered to be ancestral or traditional. Although the intervention project highly values the importance of the ancestral, in practice these concerns were subject to adjustments and technoscientific updates in order to make them coherent with national and transnational development projections and nutritional science.
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