The University of Arizona Press
At the Edge of the Pampas
Land and Longing in Argentina
Industrial agriculture has transformed vast stretches of the Earth, but few places reveal its contradictions more clearly than the Pampas of Argentina.
In At the Edge of the Pampas, anthropologist Rachel Cypher traces the explosive rise of genetically modified soybeans across one of the world’s great agricultural heartlands. Drawing on immersive long-term fieldwork, the book moves from soybean fields and cattle feedlots to dryland forests to show that industrial agriculture takes many forms. Soy—one of the world’s most standardized commodities—must first pass through local ecologies, informal economies, inherited obligations, and intimate relations of trust before it can circulate as a global asset.
Urgent and deeply original, At the Edge of the Pampas offers a major rethinking of how value is gathered within industrial capitalism and how unruly social and ecological life persists inside even the most engineered landscapes.
“As farmers push their social and environmental worlds to the brink in Argentine soy fields, Cypher asks us to consider the power of affect in determining who farms and what grows. Through rich ethnography, Cypher shows how the desire to hold on to farming as a way of life allows the agricultural frontier to continually expand with consequences for tropical forests, smallholders, agribusiness, and rural communities across the Global South.”—Andrew Flachs, author of Feeding the World as if People Mattered
“Cypher’s engrossing book tells the story of Argentina’s agricultural frontier, where the paradoxes of life amid the soy boom unfold with breathtaking clarity. Through her vivid recounting, readers will feel the excitement of another successful harvest, the anguish of a harvest lost to the ever-encroaching threats to Argentina’s fragile soy ecosystem, and the attendant sacrifices and rationalizations that mark everyday life.”—Geneva Smith, Dartmouth College
