EDGS Talk: Living Downstream of Yourself on the Rio Grande de Mindanao

Water is a part of plantation life regularly overlooked by land-centered approaches. In the Southern Philippine region of Mindanao, waterways are also underappreciated as sites of inter-ethnic conflict in a region where land is the lightning-rod issue frequently recognized as a driver of persistent violence.

In this talk hosted by the Buffett Institute's Equality Development & Globalization Studies (EDGS) program, the University of Michigan's Alyssa Paredes will trace how upstream and downstream communities of the Rio Grande de Mindanao (Pulangi River) offer competing notions of blame around the plantation economy’s wastewater. By recounting the disparate ways that Indigenous Lumad, Christian migrant and Muslim Moro communities explain the development of pollution in the rivers bordering the banana plantation, she argues against what she calls the “upstream/downstream imaginary” inherited by many scholars and environmentalists alike. The idioms of the upstream and downstream take on heightened stakes in Mindanao, where the particular cultural geographies of the sa-raya (upland) and sa-ilud (downriver) challenge commonplace metonymic associations. She develops this critique to make two points: first, there are never only two sides in the story of pollution; and second, ecological recompense is never only a one-way street.

Refreshments will be served.

About the author

Alyssa Paredes is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist researching plantation agriculture, global supply chains and environmental activism between the Philippines and Japan. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism from the Philippine South, details how the unpaid costs of industrial production circle back to haunt the plantation economy. Her work appears in Ethnos, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Antipode Online, the Journal of Political Ecology, the Journal of Asian Studies, Gastronomica and Food, Culture & Society, as well as in the edited collections The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020). She is also the co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Precarious Environments Behind Filipino Food, forthcoming in 2025 with the University of Hawaii Press. She holds a PhD from Yale University.

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