Short abstract:

In 1950s socialist Romania, a small city, modelled on the Soviet “science cities”, was erected in the marshes of Danube Delta, around the scientific research of reed. It is there that the new preparations for economic development, based on the exploitation of local reed (Phragmites australis) and acclimatization of “Italian reed” (Arundo donax), happened.
In the Romanian cash-strapped economy, after WWII, almost no effort was spared for this project, as it stumbled on the multiple ontologies of reed. A florid scientific, technical and biological imagination developed around and through the reed growing wetlands. A transnational hub of plants, scientists, plans, machines, imaginaries and hopes developed in the middle of the Danube Delta.
The economic development of large wetlands through biological and technological research was deeply entangled with plants’ lives and histories, and their multiple ontologies. The deeply rhizomatic character of Phragmites australis, its ways of moving, changing and aggregating in the Delta was framed by heavy machinery, political and scientific imaginaries. The ways in which reeds entwined with technology profoundly re-shaped the local human communities, as they were redistributed alongside new extractivist projects and means of resisting them, in common plant-human strategies of “weapons of the weak”.
The Danube Delta reeds are rhizomatic in both metaphorical and literal ways, and their metaphorical, Deleuzian flows are part of their botanical ways of being and reproducing. They are both material and rhetorical reality, that makes them “good to think with” not just a la Levi-Strauss, but also like Haraway’s figurations. As they became, in the 1950-60s, the linchpin of the new developmentalist-socialist framing of the Danube Delta, reeds, in their hard to disentangle material-rhetorical being, turned out to be critical tropes, in Haraway’s sense, that foster and amplify already existing practices to open new potential alliances and possibilities for criticizing power relations and ways of being. Reeds can provide the kind of space and rhizomatic ambiguous resistance through which, and in alliance with, socialist developmentalism, post-socialism nature protection, EU agricultural and nature policies can be understood and reframed again and again.
I argue that the socialist ecological debate centered on reeds has never died down completely and it is part of present-day re-understandings of the neo-colonial governance of “wild nature” in the wetlands of Eastern Europe.

Short bio:

Born in 1974. Medical degree from the Faculty of Medicine, Cluj-Napoca. BA in sociology and PhD in philosophy. Professor at the University of Bucharest, Department of Sociology. Alumnus of Center for Advanced Studies Sofia, Collegium Budapest, New Europe College, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Woodrow Wilson Center, and Indiana University. He has done research and published in the areas of political anthropology, history of medicine and public health, environmental sociology, and ethnicity studies.

This event is organized within the research group Environmental Humanities hosted by New Europe College.