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This paper examines the making and remaking of Taiwan's banana export market in response to the devastation caused by an outbreak of a novel infectious plant disease, Fusarium wilt disease Tropical Race 4 (TR4, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. Cubense). Taiwan was the world's fourth-largest exporter of bananas in the 1960s before the collapse of the market in the early 1970s. While scholars have drawn on actor-network theory-inspired performativity approach to understand the role of non-human actants in market-making, insufficient attention has been given to the distinct impacts of microbes on cases such as that of Taiwan's banana export market. Microbes' creative and ever-evolving qualities constantly present challenges related to the control and containment of such non-human entities, for which no pre-existing or universally applicable solutions exist. Consequently, there is a lack of research that provides useful frameworks to understand such disease-plagued markets. To bridge this gap in the literature, we examine the remaking of Taiwan's banana export market in the aftermath of the TR4 crisis using a case study approach and develop the notion of pathological markets. Inspired by recent scholarship on biosecurity and related care practices, we outline two characteristics that shape pathological markets: (a) speculative and probiotic care practices and (b) the rescaling of market organisations. The results of the fieldwork conducted as part of the present study in laboratories, government offices and on banana farms lead us to contend that the growth and development of particular microbes in multispecies environments such as Taiwan's banana farms constantly pose significant challenges for market farming. Moreover, to co-exist with the threats posed by the growth and development of microbes such as those which cause Fusarium wilt disease TR4, growers in Taiwan's banana export market rely heavily on probiotic and speculative care practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the 1990s the Taiwanese government deemed peasant folk religious activities such as temple festivals to be superstitious. Nowadays, inspired by the rural endogenous development paradigm, these activities are no longer a sign of backwardness but are a means for improving rural socio-economic wellbeing and sustainability. In some commentators' view, the arrival of endogenous development project is more democratic than centralized forms of political government. Inspired by a Foucauldian take on power, the alternative account argues that the project should be understood as a new mode of exercise of political power or neoliberal dispositif . Although Foucault's notion of governmentality has been employed by critical analysts to examine the neoliberal dispositif or the ongoing process through which durable orderings emerge, little attention has been paid to the contingency of associations, the fissiparous nature of affiliations, and the agency of material objects. To bridge this theoretical gap, this paper argues that we should think of dispositif and assemblage together. Assemblage thinking, which places more emphasis on the agency of material objects and the ephemeral nature of heterogeneous association, offers valuable insight into the government of rural culture in the neoliberal era. With reference to an ethnographical fieldwork conducted in a Taiwanese village, Zhulin village, I argue that Chinese religious practices involving diverse material actants, such as divination blocks, god statues, and spirit mediums, have a contradictory impact on the neoliberal dispositif . By drawing attention to the performance of local actants, this paper also expands the understanding of rural governance under neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]