Agricultural Extractivism in the Mediterranean Region

This book addresses the connections between food provisioning, natural resource extraction and the exploitation of human labor. Through a series of case studies, it tackles agricultural extractivist regimes in the Mediterranean, focusing on the socio-ecological and ideological practices that constrain or contribute to conflicting processes of social reproduction.
The book is divided into two parts investigating the two faces of agricultural production and opening the field of their inter-connections: (1) labor, nature and capital in food production, and (2) agricultural projects for a sustainable future. The contributed chapters provide insights into how valuation processes of human and non-human resources are entangled with economic valorization and capital accumulation. Bringing together studies based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Agricultural Extractivism in the Mediterranean Region bridges macro-level analyses and micro-level perspectives by tracing how structural constraints express themselves in concrete social relations. The reliance on detailed case studies facilitates the introduction of advanced topics in an accessible and engaging format. This book will be of interest to scholars in economic and environmental anthropology, agrarian studies and the anthropology of work, as well as sociologists and human geographers working in related areas.

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain. She received the National Prize for Research in the Humanities awarded by the Spanish Research Ministry in 2020. Her work addresses social reproduction from a multi-scale perspective and is inspired by theories of critical political economy, political ecology, moral economy and feminist economics.

Natalia Buier is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, and a member of the Grup d'Estudis sobre Reciprocitat (University of Barcelona) and the Charles Babbage Social Sciences of Work Research Group (UCM). Her current research focuses on agriculture-conservation conflicts and the integration of social and environmental justice in a context of groundwater depletion.

Theodora Vetta is a Distinguished Researcher at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Her work focuses on green energy transition, financialization, labor and indebtedness in South Europe. She is co-editor at FOCAAL – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.

Chapter "Beyond Depletion: On Value Extraction in Mediterranean Agriculture" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.