Apples into Boxes: Growing Commodities in Hastings, New Zealand

Abstract

This ethnographic account of export pipfruit growers in Hastings, New Zealand, focuses on growers' conceptions of the market, the ways in which they deal with science, and the way in which they think about and interact with organisational rationality. It is based on fieldwork conducted during 1998, among owners of relatively small orchards and packing sheds. The growers must make commodities by transforming natural material (apple trees) into commodities, by producing fruit in accordance with the exporter's Quality Standards Manual. This process is made complicated for growers by seemingly constant attempts of nature (in the form of insects, weather, and internal disorder of the fruit) to encroach on this process and reclaim its territory. This account examines the process of "getting apples into boxes" with reference to literature particularly from economic anthropology, the sociology of science, social scientific and anthropological literature on bureaucracy and organisations, and classical anthropological literature on magical and rational/irrational thinking.