Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Anthropology
Advisor
Gary Wilder
Committee Members
John Collins
Marc Edelman
Subject Categories
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Keywords
capitalism, Latin America, innovation, industrial agriculture, startups, financialization, digitization
Abstract
This dissertation studies a network of agents engaged in digitizing agriculture in Piracicaba, Brazil, from the tech developers, to the farm managers who use the technologies, passing by the private venture investors and public funding agencies. All of them have their bets on how to make the agricultural industry of food, feed and fuel efficient, and they are engaged in transforming a mid-size town in the state of Sao Paulo into an agricultural Silicon Valley. Each chapter focuses on a specific group of agents (or stakeholders, as they call themselves), and the tools they develop to create legibility, efficiency, and remove possible frictions between them. It starts with a group of people in Piracicaba that created an innovation ecosystem, then it examines the startup founders and their creative technologies, following the angel investors and venture capital funds who pour money gambling on potentially successful nascent companies, and finally the workers that operate the strategic decisions of the companies and farms. At the same time, this dissertation shows that productivity does not reduce the lifeworld of people, animals and plants, and it ends with an analysis of the life of multiple beings, like pigeons and worms, attending to the limits of the dystopic dream of order, numbers, digits and rationality.
Inspired by authors who have shown that composite texts account for the multiple layers and scales that engender the social conditions we live under (Tsing 2015a, 2015b; Hetherington 2020, 2025), I organize my chapters as the layers that compose the agricultural innovation ecosystem. This study, therefore, explores how ecosystemic forms of organization reproduce old and create new routes of capitalist production, accumulation and distribution. The main argument of the dissertation is that the assemblage of actors conjures a pure, frictionless world, expecting to know and control all sorts of living dynamics – the life of crops and animals, as well as the relations between people – making them a productive soil for value creation (or profit making). I argue that, with industrial farming, we can witness the making of life within capitalism, when different stakeholders expect to appropriate life forces reshaping them into productive ones. At the same time, the dissertation calls the attention to the life forces that escape, resist or disrupt the fantasy of knowability and control.
Recommended Citation
Pulsini Louzada Badue, Ana Flavia, "Pigeons, Satellites and Angels: Industrial Agriculture, Digital Technologies, and Financial Investments in Brazil" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6790
