(COM)PROMISED LANDS, AGRICULTURE AS SIN

For the philosopher Timothy Morton, the origin of religion has been narrated as the beginning of agricultural time, an origin in sin. Before the fall, there was no scarcity in the garden. Cursed was the ground as punishment for original sin, and there was no possibility of return: Cherubims and a flaming sword which turned every way were placed at the east of Eden (Gen. 3.24). Such a curse would instill a fear of barren land, of famine, of futile labor. The solution would eventually become monocropping and industrial farming that threaten to cause mass extinction. But how can industrial agriculture fail to produce more food? How can the solution be the new problem? These reflections and questions will explore (com)promised lands in two Latin American novels now lost to the canon —Ramón Amaya Amador’s Prisión verde (1945), and Ernesto L. Castro’s Campo arado (1953)—, as well as in the classic and very canonical Doña Bárbara (1929) by Romulo Gallegos, and in an Iberian television series, Mar de plástico (2015-2016) that also calls attention to toxic, lawless farming. The intention is not so much to provide answers here for the open questions, but rather to think through the knots, the tangles, the interactions. This paper is an effort to go beyond dualistic representational systems such as farmer-herder, Cain-Abel, nature-culture, industrial-organic, lawless-law-abiding, heedful-unwary, carnivore-vegetarian.