Please note: This lecture will be held in person (room TBA) and virtually on Zoom. This event is free and open to the public, but you must register to attend online. Register for the Zoom webinar at https://myumi.ch/QMqnV.

Japan is the only place in the world where bananas are marketed and priced by cultivation altitude. In the late 1980’s, plantation managers sourcing the fruit from the southern Philippine region of Mindanao discovered a paradigm-shifting formula: the higher up one grew, the closer they were to replicating the heightened sweetness of colonial Taiwanese bananas, a taste lost in the switch to Philippine supply. This talk offers the first transnational history of the banana’s transition from a fungible commodity to a product differentiated into “lowland,” “midland,” “highland,” and “super highland” categories. By focusing on the tensions between fungibility and differentiation, it offers an account both of an idiosyncratic marketing strategy particular to Japan and the Philippines, and of a dynamic that pervades the creation of all commodities under capitalism.

Alyssa Paredes is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research lies at the intersection of industrial agriculture, transnational supply chains, and solidarity activism between the Southern Philippines and Japan. Her book, Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism and the Unmaking of Asia’s Banana Republic, is forthcoming with the University of California Press in December 2026. Her work appears in journals and volumes in anthropology, history, geography, food studies, and Asian studies.

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