Sowing the State: Nationalism, Sovereignty, and Agrarian Politics in Venezuel

Sowing the State is an ethnographic account of the remaking of the Venezuelan nation-state at the start of the twenty-first century which underscores the centrality of agriculture to the re-envisioning of sovereignty. The narrative explores the recent efforts of the Venezuelan government to transform the rural areas of the nation into a model of agriculture capable of feeding its mostly urban population as well as the logics and rationales for this particular reform project. The dissertation explores the subjects, livelihoods, and discourses conceived as the proper basis of sovereignty as well as the intersection of agrarian politics with statecraft. In a nation heavily dependent on the export of oil and the import of food, the politics of land and its various uses is central to governance and the rural is a contested field for a variety of social groups. Based on extended fieldwork in El Centro Tecnico Productivo Socialista Florentino, a state owned enterprise in the western plains of Venezuela, the narrative analyses the challenges faced by would-be nation builders after decades of neoliberal policy designed to integrate the nation into the global market as well as the activities of the enterprise directed at transcending this legacy. Not merely a restoration of the status quo or reassertion of a prior independence, I argue the Venezuelan nation is being reinvented in this drive for sovereignty and the tensions between peasants, technical experts and workers in the Florentino enterprise reflect the cleavages of an emerging state form.