The Commodity Chain of the Knowledge Trade

 

            Usually when I read our assigned books, I try and focus on who the author is trying to give the power of the narrative to. In Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s Jungle Laboratories, that was one thing I did not have to question as Soto Laveaga spelled out in the introduction that this was going to be a peasant-centric narrative of the barbasco trade. So while reading it I focused on what power the commodity (barbasco) held and how it was able to be used to allow those who were using it, in this case primarily the Oaxacan peasantry, to gain agency. What I found myself thinking about however was that barbasco was the sub-commodity to the primary product of change in this narrative. The knowledge of science was the true element that gave the power to whoever was involved in the barbasco trade. Obviously at first, the scientists were not Mexican and the peasants added to the trade as what most peasants generally add to most agricultural or manufacturing trades, the intense and underappreciated hard labor. What is fascinating is that through different elements and actors, some of the peasants were able to gain agency by buying into the commodity of knowledge, adopting the academic driven trade of science. In Carney’s Black Rice, the power that came from manufacturing techniques and technological prowess that the slaves were using to advance the rice trade, and in doing so giving them more agency than simply being forced labor, had already developed within their own community. It was something that they owned, knowledge that they had developed. With the Oaxacan peasants, it was something they had to go out and attain; something foreign to their community. The commodity chain that is the attainment of knowledge that can be used for ones own profit and power is shown in the barbasco trade. The value of that knowledge of scientific technology allowed for barbasco to become something of value within the international economy, but the ability to “purchase” or trade in that knowledge, instead of having it be homegrown within the community, gave authority and agency to a group of peasants who would have otherwise been written off in the commodity chain of barbasco as simply the muscle and labor that brought the product to the manufacturers.