Introduction

Aprevious issue of EASTS (volume 5, number 2) presented four articles addressing the theme of rice science, rice technology, and rice societies, using approaches from both anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). This issue of the journal presents the second and final part of the collection, containing three more articles that focus on rice and materiality in different East Asian contexts and settings.

In our introduction to part 1, we noted that rice is an inescapable cornerstone of life in Asian societies, which makes rice a multifaceted object—an important food crop, a cultural resource, and an economic commodity. Consequently, it is also a vital concern among policy makers, regulators, politicians, farmers, traders, and consumers. Not surprisingly, over the last hundred years rice has been an object of study for scientists and plant breeders, who continue to generate new knowledge about rice and to design and carry out interventions intended to alter the characteristics of rice plants and grains, farming techniques, processing methods, or distribution systems.

The articles in this collection all focus on the materiality of rice, which we and the authors have used as a stable point of reference that allows us to follow rice through the diverse contexts and settings in which it moves. As it does so, different characteristics become salient, and rice assumes a variety of different appearances and meanings. Our shared focus on materiality brings rice itself into sharp relief while making connections and highlighting contrasts between the different settings where this important crop interacts with people and technological systems.

Materiality is a touchstone for anthropologists and STS scholars. Contributors to these disciplines have shown that both human societies in general and technoscientific cultures in particular are simultaneously social and material. In the STS notions of the "actant" (Latour 1992) or the "boundary object" (Star and Griesemer 1989), for example, material objects are seen explicitly as interacting with human beings or mediating between groups of actors that have different appreciations of objects or technologies.

This capacity of material objects to mediate between or distinguish social and cultural systems is also a central theme in classic works of anthropology such as Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1990 [1923]), a text that launched the subfield of material culture studies. Anthropologists have since made great progress in studying the relationship between human individuals and material objects, their minds and bodies, their cultures and societies, and their histories (Tilley et al. 2006).

Another key idea originating in Mauss's work, though less known, is his argument that the human body itself should be understood as the fundamental and original form of technology, the instrument through which human beings understand, interact with, and manipulate the material environment in which they live (Mauss 2006). Presenting an apparent overture for a rapprochement with STS scholarship, material culture scholars have also explored the capacity of science and technology to change material objects, to cause change in social and material orders, and to shape the dynamics of material cultures (e.g., Appadurai 1988).

The essays in part 1 of this collection explored the ways in which farmers, scientists, development workers, and anthropologists grappled with the materiality of rice in four different contexts where actors were trying to bring about positive change in the lives of rice farmers and/or consumers. The four articles described different cases in which actors, seeking to manipulate rice or change the way it was cultivated, confronted the material properties of rice and addressed a series of very practical problems involved in the conduct of laboratory experiments, field trials, and farming itself.

The three essays presented in this second part of the collection share a slightly broader focus, as they review rather large-scale, medium- and long-term shifts in the way rice is grown and consumed in two countries—China and Cambodia—that have undergone major sociopolitical and economic changes in recent decades.

Hart Feuer's article analyzes the effort to establish a market for organic rice in Cambodia. As Feuer explains, internal conflict and decades of international isolation delayed the introduction of the high-yielding varieties of rice that, together with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, were key...