Amnesia
/amˈniːzɪə/
noun
a partial or total loss of memory.
The rice agricultural practices of our time are fueled by the globalised synthetic fertilisers and machineries. Such newly introduced elements threaten not only the farmland ecologies but also indigeneous knowledge, or otherwise known as local wisdom, on rice farming and local seeds. Since the Green Revolution, corporations like the International Rice Research Institute have attempted a blanket change in rice seeds, as well as, traditional rice agricultural practices. In coherence with monoculture, it has contributed to the disappearance of thousands of heritage varieties from farmers’ land. When varieties disappear, the loss is also of the associated traditional knowledge. This phenomenon is now common to all as agricultural AMNESIA.
Wonders of the World' a travel series shows women working in paddy fields in Java, Indonesia. Videos Credit: Critical Past
These visual abstracts inform us of what were once common practices in rice farming that are slowly turning into a form of agricultural AMNESIA: Manual planting of rice seeds, ploughing and sowing rice seedlings in a field, threshing and grinding rice, harvesting rice with aniani1, and pounding rice with vernacular machinery.
1. aniani is an indigenous rice harvesting palm knife in Indonesia. It is held in the palm of the hand between the second and third fingers, with the blade pointing outwards and two fingers curled around each end of the stick. The harvester gathers one or more heads of rice in the free hand and then saws it=the rice heads off the stalk with the blade and drops the seeds into a bag or basket. Source
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