Humans and maize are coequal partners, or
Maize has a strategy?

I may have missed something, but in nothing I have read by Hartigan, or for that matter Latour, have I seen anything that would support these claims. And human life as I know it frequently includes unequal partners and rarely includes strategists. Most of us are just bumbling along. Why shouldn’t our interactions with other species be seen in the same light?

A careful reading of Hartigan suggests to me that what he is up to is pushing the boundaries of conventional thinking about ethnography and he is conscious of what he is doing. Will he succeed? We don’t know yet. Should we say,”You can’t do that” because it violates current conventional wisdom? Remember Galileo? Remember Darwin?

The question then that comes to my mind is if Professor Hartigan is employing a similar approach?

Hartigan is a scientist

Remember: he’s doing an ‘ethnography of maize’, and endorses the notion that humans and plants are co-equal partners in the plants’ domestication, which they aren’t, unless you’re happy with the idea that some ancestral maize plants (eg) voluntary died in order to promote other kinds of maize that humans would find more productive. Or, well, unless you’re happy with the idea that maize can voluntarily do anything. Which it can’t. It’s a plant.

That answer may not yet be fully developed. That, however, is no reason to rule out any possible answer.

I’m not ruling out every possible answer. I just see no reason to believe that maize had a strategy with its interactions with humans; I’m not ruling it a priori, I merely see no reason whatsoever to believe it. I see no reason to believe that maize decided to be domesticated in any way at all. I see no reason to look at domestication by ignoring human intention, beliefs, and desires. No reason has been provided for any of this; it’s just been stated to be the latest thing, the new thing, the revolutionary thing that overturns our previous understanding. That’s not sufficient.

Neither do Navajos.

No?

Strictly speaking only the librettist is Navajo, but the point is: Navajo people could write symphonies if they wanted to, whereas dandelions couldn’t even want to. Because people are one thing, plants are another. There may be shades of grey in between, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make some pretty important distinctions between things.

This also reflects shifting sensibilities among researchers, that what we observe other species doing is not a matter of anthropocentric projection but rather a fairly accurate perception of homologous activities.

Which brings us to a serious question about the possibility of doing an ethnography of maize. It needs to be spelled out a bit more clearly how “ethnography of maize” implies activities perceptibly homologus with those involved in ethnography of humans. That answer may not yet be fully developed. That, however, is no reason to rule out any possible answer. If it were, we would have no science at all.

And I disagree: thinking subjects aren’t requisite for ethnography.

Christ.

There was a time when ethnographers justified separating anthropology from ‘science’ on the grounds that humans, as clever agents capable of thinking about and rationalising their acts, are qualitatively different from, say, corn, which can’t do those things. You cannot do an ethnography of a plant.

It’s the same reason that we don’t see books written about the poems of pineapples or the symphonies of dandelions or the scientific investigations undertaken by crabgrass. There may not be an absolute distinction between humans and plants or whatever else you like, but the fact is that dandelions don’t compose symphonies. It would be inappropriate for a musicologist to claim to be doing a musicological study of dandelion-Beethoven.

It is likewise inappropriate for an anthropologist to claim to be doing an ‘ethnography of corn’.

I don’t think the emperor’s new clothes mechanism is sufficient to explain what you’re doing. There’s also the sunk cost fallacy to take into account. I suppose you’ve invested significant time and energy in this pursuit; it must be tempting to keep throwing good money after bad. I suggest cutting your losses.

The reduction of anthropology to labored translations of what we think we are hearing when the people whose lives we study speak to us in languages of which we mostly have only a feeble grasp has been a disaster, leading to what I have labeled “ethnographic involution,” a process analogous to that described by Clifford Geertz in his book Agricultural Involution</>.

NOTE: I can easily imagine readers who will be upset, unhappy, outraged that I dare to say such things. I may be going too far in making these claims. Fear not. I have a thick skin. I am old and have no academic career to pursue. I wil never serve on your hiring or tenure committee. I would be delighted to have them proved wrong.

You are less interested in studying plant geneticists than you are in a plant. This is fine. There are many people who study plants.

From what I gathered then is it safe to conclude that what you are doing is not anthropology? You might be best suited to directly engage with botanists because they dedicate themselves to studying plants.

Perhaps because many things which once seemed self-evident no longer seem obvious. Once seemingly clear distinctions like mind vs body turn out to have a thousand shades of grey.

When did mind/body seem like a clear distinction? Surely a long time ago – before Phineas Gage and his railroad spike. It’s more or less obvious now that the ‘mind’ must at the very least supervene on the body, that there is no ‘mind’ independent of the body.

Claiming that consciousness is an amorphous force of the universe and that even dust motes are conscious – that would be an absurdity of a similar kind to the claims of Pollan et al. The fact that plants don’t develop long term strategies for interacting with humans is self-evident, and that’s not because we’re all blinkered. It’s self-evident because there’s no reason to think that it’s wrong.

Maize can’t think. You can’t do an ethnography of maize. The only mechanism I can see that would allow for this is the same mechanism that operates widely in continental thought and the social sciences: the emperor’s new clothes. No one wants to look stupid or lacking in insight, everyone wants to get ahead at court.

And just as no one in Andersen’s story (there are older versions, btw) argued with the little boy about whether or not the clothes were real, so no continental theory enthusiast will argue about this stuff, not really. There’s never any push back. Just retreat, safe in the knowledge that few in the academy will want to argue about it.

Anyway, I’m not trying to maintain an absolute distinction between humans and other non-human organisms – tool use, language, etc, are not unique to humans. But that doesn’t mean that plants can think or that because something is alive it has some kind of agency equivalent to that of a human. At the very least, humans have much more highly developed versions of traits found in other species, and human selective modification of plants and animals is different to dugongs grazing on sea grass. Cultivation isn’t the same as domestication.

Moreover, domestication almost never happens to only one species in a human context. It’s something humans can think about, process, analogise – and suddenly they start domesticating more than one plant or animal. It’s not haphazard. It’s humans doing stuff to plants, and generally humans doing stuff to animals too. Plants aren’t the ones with the strategies.