Abstract
Is there a plant, a crop or a raw material we cannot live without? Due to its sensitivitity, and through specific forms of care, Theobroma cacao only grows in a narrow tropical belt surrounding equator. Once a foreign body to Ghana, it transformed the landscape, altered original matriliear structures and generated new modes of capitalism.
Those processes are still ongoing as new challenges of droughts, viruses, fungi, insects and international regulations are adding up. The majority of cocoa farmers never tasted chocolate and often lacks basic nutrients, meanwhile those from their soils are circulating to satisfy our nutritional, and more often emotional, needs.
Approaching the discourse of otherness through plant-centred anthropological analysis, and through the lens of a local research institution, I am seeking to understand how colonialism, global capitalism, local kinship structures and their associated unequal power relations play out within a broader web of life. Amidst the differentiating temporalities of the human and non-human, I aim to explore North-south relationships, alike genotype-environment interactions and master-slave dialectics, to point to inter-specific actions and relationships that are indissoluable in space and time.
At the intertwining of society of discipline and that of control, our bodies and those of cocoa trees, and particularly those whose consciousness stems more directly from European enlightment, claim personal responsibility over collective endurance. Our co-presence is possible only through examination or even violation of parametes of time: breaking traditions, accelerating the ripening time, sharing farms over generations, anticipating future in scientific experiments.
Or perhaps while we pray to promote sustainable development.