Fledgling Farms and Failing Health: How the Polypore State Transforms the Multispecies Relations in Serbia’s Raspberry Fields

Abstract

Abstract Extending from an ethnographic case study that demonstrates the existential troubles of Serbian farmers to continue raspberry production for the global market, this article anthropologically hones in on the intertwining of human and non-human labour (production) with socio-economic and techno-scientific policies of care (reproduction). Different waves of state transformation—the build-up and decay of formal employment coupled with the emergence, then exhaustion of the welfare state, its socio-liberal transformation in the early 2000s, followed by its polypore repurposing for illiberal ends since 2012, have led to a zombified hope in the state’s will to care for its population. Skilled and unskilled workers have emigrated to Western labour markets, while the climate crisis gained momentum because of the underfunding of critical infrastructures of value. Adopting a Marxist-Eco-Feminist care perspective, the case study thus embeds seemingly disconnected concerns within wider struggles on the boundaries of the (welfare) state, economy and techno-science.