Speaker: Gabriel G. Roman
Dates: 18 December 2025, 11 am
Venue: Université libre de Bruxelles, Salle R42.4.502 (Auditory Paul Hatry)
Link: PhD Thesis Defense: Gabriel Roman Graton

This thesis explores the persistence of native maize in the Mixe highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico, where it has long been cultivated in milpa polycropping systems and remains the staple food and a cornerstone of the local cosmology and social life. Since the 1990s, Mexican smallscale agriculture has been disrupted by neoliberal reforms in rural policy, which have fueled rural outmigration and, more recently, compounded ecological pressures associated with climate change. These challenges have deeply affected the Mixe region, leading the younger generation to turn away from agriculture. Nevertheless, elder cultivators remain committed to their milpas and their flourishing. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the community of Tamazulápam del Espíritu Santo (in 2022 and 2023), I examine the meticulous practices of vegetal care that allow Mixe cultivators to safeguard their valued seeds amid the growing threat of ecological loss. Central to these practices is what I call respectful care: a tripartite relationship in which cultivators tend to their maize while showing their respect to the deities who, in turn, care back for their milpas. Respectful care permeates all aspects of Mixe agriculture, from seed selection and sowing to harvests and ritual practices, and cultivators are keenly aware that their actions toward maize have effects on other ontological levels. Through this conceptualization, I show how matters of productivity, biodiversity, seed circulation, quantification, and loss can only be understood as part of the respectful relations cultivators strive to establish with maize, deities, and other entities in their more-than-human milpa ecology. Both resilient and fragile, these respectful relations, I suggest, challenge the hegemonic practices of agricultural production and offer an alternative to its productivist logic. Finally, although grounded in the Mixe context, I maintain that respectful care provides a valuable analytical tool for examining underexplored tripartite relationships with plants in indigenous communities, both in Mesoamerica and beyond

Jury

• Sasha NEWELL - Université libre de Bruxelles, Chair
• Olivia ANGÉ - Université libre de Bruxelles, Secretary
• Elise DEMEULENAERE - École des hautes études en sciences sociales
• Elizabeth EWART - Oxford University
• Marianne Elisabeth LIEN - University of Oslo
• Perig PITROU - École des hautes études en sciences sociales
• Carlos SAUTCHUK - University of Brasília