Vital decomposition: Soil practitioners + life politics By Kristina M. Lyons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 218 pp.

Rural Colombia is frequently narrated through stories of violence—of the country's long-running civil war, as well as the violence of dispossession, extraction, abandonment, and exclusion. This approach is so endemic that it coalesced into what became known as violentología (violentology), a formalized intellectual space devoted to the study of violence in Colombia. Kristina Lyons's excellent book, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners + Life Politics, animates what an ethnographic and conceptual decentering of violence in Colombia can look like, as she theorizes “the cultivation of life in the midst of death” as a mode of transforming beings and relations. The book draws on long-term fieldwork with state soil scientists as well as rural communities in the Amazonian department of Putumayo, where the attempted eradication of illicit coca production has led to militarized aerial fumigation campaigns and crop substitution programs. Lyons's analysis centers hojarasca, the litter layer of leaves, stalks, and other decomposing elements that regenerate Amazonian soils often regarded by scientists as naturally thin, poor, and senile. The book illustrates how hojarasca not only generates vibrant life, practices, and relations, but also “forces thought,” complicating neat divisions between life and death. Vital Decomposition thoughtfully traces how soil scientists and Amazonian farmers work with, care for, and conceptualize soil, putting scientific and rural farming philosophies and practices in conversation throughout the chapters. Its account of the history of soil science in Colombia outlines the ways that the notion of the Amazon's “poor soils” was tied to racialized narratives of illegal economic activity in the region, which were then used to justify militarized counternarcotics operations. Lyons is careful to illustrate how some soil scientists also questioned this logic, attempting to craft a “minor soil science” that might hold open tensions within dominant state soil-classification systems. Drawing on research with Colombian agrologist Abdón Cortés—who is credited with both implementing the USDA's soil-classification system in Colombia and challenging its applicability to Amazonian soils—Lyons illuminates how soil scientists experienced both the constraint of established soil taxonomies and the possibilities of partial encounter and alliance with rural communities that these minor practices opened up. The book's conceptual universe and poetics are drawn largely from Lyons's fieldwork with alternative agricultural practitioners in Putumayo. Through it, Lyons builds an expansive discussion of the ways Amazonian men and women become selvacinos/as, or people who cultivate life and living knowledge in the selva (whose rough and contested translation is “jungle”) through experimental practices of bringing plants, people, soils, seeds, and other elements into relation. These practices—occurring across an array of creeping plant gardens, farm schools, territories, agroforestry systems, workshops, and small farms—both produce a different kind of “Amazonian human” and transform socioecological, ethico-political, and epistemological relations. Lyons's analysis does not place soil scientist and selvacino/a philosophies on oppositional epistemological poles, or demand recognition of selvacino/a practices as a functional equivalent to modern science. Instead, Lyons offers “asymmetrical engagements” as a critical alternative that “displaces the primacy of ‘knowing’ in favor of ongoing processes of unlearning and relearning” (p. 174) through the decolonization of technoscientific relations to soil. What emerges are not only decolonized farms, but also Amazonian humans. Lyons is clear that these Amazonian humans do not perform a return to an authentic or traditional past, but rather “reclaim practices” as they learn to cultivate the selva, and themselves be cultivated by it. One of the greatest strengths of Vital Decomposition is its rich conceptual poetics. This unfolds in the book through actual poetry, which is interspersed throughout the text. But it also takes shape through Lyons's attentiveness to her rural sites as sensorium, in which gardens buzz, hum, pulsate, and resonate in a cacophony that itself forces thought. This is central to the notion of resonating farms as “vital spaces,” which Lyons suggests might serve as conceptual and political tools for reimagining and transforming Amazonian economic, socioecological, affective, and ethico-political relations. In this sense, the book is not only beautifully written but also conceptualized with an attention to the productivity of the intersections between ethnography, poetry, and theory, through which Lyons brings concepts themselves alive. While Vital Decomposition is not a direct response to the idea of the “space of death”—also drawn from the history of the Putumayo—it indirectly offers a reply. Lyons gives us “becoming into death” as a mode of dying, one that is simultaneously transformative and generative, in which decomposition recycles the selva and gives life to ecologies, people, and practices. These are the book's “life politics,” which are at work in spaces that are seeped in the violence of war, mineral extraction, agribusiness, displacement, and chemical fumigation, and are simultaneously vibrant and very much alive. The book will find broad audiences in environmental anthropology, feminist science studies, and Latin American studies, as well as among students of the soil in agronomy, soil science, and geology. Readers interested in the ethics and craft of ethnographic writing will also find great value in this book and its poetic theorization of “life making life happier” (p. 141).