1 How seeds make (and unmake) relations: Affect and power in the farming world (southern Chile) Seeds, Soils, and Politics: Cultivating Citizenship and Governance (workshop) Piergiorgio Di Giminiani What relations are established by and through seeds in everyday rural life? The significance of this question is not immediately clear. In a present historical time, defined by the marginalization of farmers’ issues from the political arena and the emergence of new forms of seed proprietorship capitalized transnational companies, asking about relatedness seems futile to say the least. Yet, this question can help us to move beyond a usual trouble, both analytical and political, that of thinking about everyday terms of engagement with seeds and overt political action concerning seed governance in separation. The trouble consists in reducing questions of control over seed use and circulation to a matter of concern for environmental activists, alien to everyday struggles for the endurance of small scale farming jeopardized by increasing outmigration and decreasing competitiveness. Far from being unrelated fields of human experience, the politics and affects of seed use and circulation are deeply entangled within the broader space of relatedness in which farmers move about. Behind an apparent absence of political action among many farmers, such as those in southern Chile, lie multiple strategies, often covert, of retaining control over seeds. More than other phenomena, human engagement with seeds phenomenon demands to be understood without detaching its public and everyday manifestations for the inherent abilities of seeds to articulate relations across different ontological barriers and political fields. In fact, seeds act both as objects of exchange and transactions mediating power relations among humans, and a form of life in constant transformation and whose control by humans remain often a partial attempt. In this paper, I would like to propose the idea of relatedness in attempting to understanding the sensorial and public manifestations of today human engagement with seeds. The ability of seeds to make and unmake relations across different borders (political, economic, social and ontological) is a key process in the ongoing constitution of the farming world, a term that I use to refer to the lived world created through farming practices. World, in this sense, does not refer to a self- contained and pre-established space of culture, but rather to a process in perennial constitution, whose definition is the ultimate matter of political action. The world I have in mind here is one built through farming, a type of action that reconfigures human-environmental engagement and power relations among humans at the same time. To explore the idea of relatedness in seed and soil governance, I will draw from my working knowledge of farming in indigenous Mapuche settlements in southern Chile. Affect, care and growth: seeds and soils in indigenous southern Chile Most of the things I have learned about farming in southern Chile are originally drawn from ethnographic research on land restitution, a governmental process that began in 1993. Some of my time in the field was spent in state offices where meetings between public officers and claimants I was collaborating with were held. The rest of my research unfolded in a rural indigenous settlement, working side by side in the fields with claimants, an experience that proved pivotal for me to link