Actants

<italic>Actants</italic> applies to the writing of history some of the core themes of Actor Network Theory—further enriched by other recent approaches like interspecies agency and critical Anthropocene studies. It integrates the anti-humanist or post-humanist and the emic, anthropological, or ontological approaches to explicate the constituents of a cropscape unfolding with an inner momentum of their own while inflecting the others—but none totally in control nor inevitable. The cases address the varied experiences (and losses) of power and agency, of love and violence, in rubber tapping, elephants in tea gardens, cinchona extraction, boll-weevils in cotton fields and fire in eucalyptus plantations. They elucidate how the capacity of actants to effect change depends on their ever-changing identity and associations—all marked by very significant moments and instances of epistemic disjuncture and quiet jettisoning.