Review: Embodying Biodiversity – FoodAnthropology
Terese Gagnon, ed. Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty. 274 pp. University of Arizona Press. 2024. ISBN: 9780816553983
Christian Keeve (PhD Candidate, Geography, University of Kentucky.Predoctoral Fellow, Woodson Institute, University of Virginia)
Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty, edited by Terese V. Gagnon, is a celebration of the intimate, sensuous, careful labor of small-scale agrobiodiversity conservation in place, as well as the vibrant ecological knowledges of the farmers and landworkers who steward refuges of biodiversity and craft politics of sovereignty. I was excited to read this text as someone whose work is inspired by the intimate ecologies of plant relations and seedkeeping in service of food and environmental justice movement work. It is through embodied, ethical multispecies relations, with humans and plants alike, that this text foregrounds as essential to cultivating abundant food systems in the face of environmental precarity, but also to political worldmaking that undergirds ongoing struggles around seed, food, and land sovereignty.
At the intersections of multispecies ethnography and ethnobiology, Gagnon brings together a group of contributors to constellate across eight sites of ‘small c’ conservation around the world, from the huerta of Mapuche communities in the southern Andes, to the banana forests of Uganda, to the legacies of plot and plantation that resonate through Toronto, the Caribbean, India, and the U.S. South. Each with their own cadence of ethnographic storytelling, these thinkers push forward the work of Virginia Nazarea, fleshing out the concept of the homegarden as a spatial and agroecological analytic that has methodological significance to qualitative research in food and land work, as well as a site of political possibility. These stories are global in scale while remaining intimate in practice. They connect the socioecological placemaking of the homegarden as a political project that navigates border regimes, conservation frameworks, supply chains, and climate change. With a focus on the ecologies that emerge from interactions between people, place, and plants, these contributors emphasize the role of nonhumans in making spaces of memory, possibility, and agroecological creativity. Interspersed through the text are works of poetry that do their own creative and intellectual work. They contextualize the scholarship with life-giving moments of breath, loss, and freedom, beginning with poet Ally Ang’s “Invocation,” a letting go and a breathing out.
The first section, “Refugia,” opens with Chen Chen’s “Set The Garden On Fire,” which weaves a vision of placemaking through insurgent multispecies community against barriers and borders. In Chapter 1, Mike Anastario discusses the development of border-crossing communal knowledge politics around soil, agrichemicals, and corn (maíz blanco and maíz capulin) through practices of collective labor in the milpas of rural El Salvador. In the second chapter, Shannon A. Novak traces transnational spiritual mobilities in the Indo-Guyanese diaspora of Toronto, cultivating a Black geographic analysis of the demonic grounds along the edges of the plantation where global supply chains impact ritual practice, setting neem, hibiscus, and black-eyed peas into conversation and community. Chapter 3, written by Gagnon, uplifts the politics of refusal being crafted by border crossing Karen youth living in refugee camps, who collectively hold onto cultural foods, communal meals, and visions of return. Wrapping up this section is Yasuaki Sato’s discussion of banana forest lusuku (pl. ensuku) homegardens in Uganda, spaces of autonomy and rest across life and death, in which banana diversity is cultivated through extensive folk taxonomies and community knowledge formations.
Part II, “Sovereignty,” opens with Fred L. Joiner’s “Sikasso Snow,” a vision of an otherwhere and an otherwise of dust devoid of harvest. In the fifth chapter, José Tomás Ibarra, Julián Caviedes, and Antonia Barreau think through the intersections of environment, history, and farming with the Mapuche communities of the southern Andes. Emily Ramsey follows in Chapter 6 with Latinx immigrant farmers in the southeast United States navigating embodiment and inscription to become legible to the agrifood market, while also leveraging dynamics of legibility and illegibility to cultivate their own cultural foods—like Aji Amarillo peppers—and build local markets through community relationships. In Chapter 7, Valentina Peveri attends to perennial ensete plants, which, as they argue, inspire entanglements of intimacy, love, and sovereignty through its own sorts of illegibility and non-scalability. Finally, the eighth chapter, by Justin Simpson, maps out competing visions of golden rice and Carolina Gold rice, the former speaking to the atomistic genetic resource model of plant breeding and the latter carrying legacies of Black land and food stewardship in the United States Lowcountry. The text closes with Evelyn Flores’s “The Flame Tree,” a moment of haunting and loss through bodies and across species.
Through a diversity of theoretical formations, these pieces are predicated on place-based, engaged ethnographic storytelling of people, plants, and land, mixing dedicated theoretical work with vignettes of visceral, embodied encounters with interlocutors and collaborators, human and non. Being intellectually indebted to Nazarea’s work, this collection of case studies reflects, as Nazarea says in the Epilogue, disciplinary and methodological shifts that embrace intimacy, care, and humanity through ethical multispecies relations. This collection would be great for a grad level methods class focused on qualitative and mixed methods research across agroecology, food studies, political ecology, and environmental ethnography, or even an undergrad syllabus about global food systems and biodiversity stewardship. I would also recommend this as a resource for community education work with seedkeepers, land stewards, and food justice advocates. It not only speaks to scholars of agrarian and environmental studies, but also to farmers and seed justice organizers doing the grounded work of movement building around cultural seedways, diasporic storytelling, and agrobiodiversity conservation in place.
The collection shines through its foregrounding of affective and embodied multispecies relations as integral to both ethical research practices and political worldmaking. It enthusiastically embraces grounded theory and engaged scholarship that literally gets one’s hands dirty, mobilizing ethnographic research in service of solidarity with political projects of food and land justice. Gagnon lays out the stakes of the text as life-giving politics of care and connection in the face of collapse, arguing for the importance of everyday, sensuous conservation as a worldmaking practice being carried out by the brilliance of the people stewarding the world’s biodiversity. However, affect, embodiment, and the politics of the human are positioned as central concepts that the structure of the text doesn’t manage to flesh out as fully as they could be. As with many collected editions, there is a breadth of conceptual and methodological threads woven together that I was left wanting to follow. The smallness of ‘small c’ conservation and political potential of affective multispecies encounter is a rich mode of inquiry and solidarity, and these pieces cast seeds that build upon the theoretical significance of embodiment. Hopefully, this work can provide abundant returns that speak back to scholarship around affect and intimacy in research methods, as well as critical discussions around crafting more-than-human research through a reparative politic of marginalized peoples fighting for the fullness of their humanity. I look forward to ongoing work from all of these contributors that takes seriously the insurgencies and possibilities of community-based seed sovereignty in times of socioecological precarity.
