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Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Society and Co-organised by Durham and Edinburgh universities, HEAT1 is a two-day international conference on planetary health and the environment. The conference will be hosted by Durham’s Department of Anthropology, one of only a few in the UK to integrate social, health, and evolutionary fields. Drawing from that diversity, HEAT aims to bring together perspectives from the full spectrum of contemporary anthropology.

HEAT Programme

Crawling remains: Toxic legacies of empire

Sandra Calkins, University of Bayreuth

Cosmopolities sordidus, a small black bug, also known as the banana weevil, can’t fly or move far. A stowaway travelling from place to place hidden within plant matter, cosmopolites sordidus, a species native to South-East Asia, has nonetheless crawled its way around the globe, reorganizing banana production in its sway. In Uganda, the main focus of this paper, the weevil arrived with colonial planting materials at the Entebbe botanic gardens and since has devasted plantations across the country. Even in small farming settings like in Uganda, where rich histories of banana cultivation have resulted in dozens of loved local varieties and global commerce’s favorite banana (the Cavendish) was not introduced, the weevil is among the devasting banana pests that result in a high use of agrochemicals. Farmers in Uganda have long fought the weevil both through conventional management strategies and pesticides, many meanwhile banned, which are known to leave traces in bodies, air, soil and water sources. Tracing the entangled histories of cosmopolites sordidus and bananas sheds light on two species intimately tied to colonial-capitalist expansion. It allows reflecting on the toxic legacies of colonial extractivism, both in terms of accumulating substances in Ugandan landscapes as well as in the terms of orientations and values pursued in present-day agricultural production.