Author: Collective Volume
Dates: 7 April 2026
Venue: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300281774/tuberous-worlds/

The world is much more tuberous than most people know. From the millions of smallholder peasants cultivating tuber plants to the teams of scientists mapping potato genomic information to the industrial manufacturers selecting the best varieties for producing French fries, life unfolds in a tuber-enabled environment. This book describes the many different forms of “tuberous association”—the patterns of production, kinship, collaboration, resistance, feeding, and care that arise from and are made possible by tuberous partnerships.

Tubers are vital partners, or allies, that support life within autonomous collectives and at the same time are entwined in the extractive practices of colonization, land enclosure, and plantation—facts that reveal the complexity and contingency of vegetal politics. To explore this complexity, the contributors to this book consider an array of tuberous bodies, such as cassava, taro, yam, potato, and sweet potato, to draw out the subtleties and textures of human-tuber companionship in all their startling diversity.

By considering tubers not only as a “product” or “staple,” but also as partners, kin, and ancestors—as lifeforms grafted to our own—the authors argue for a nuanced understanding of tuberous politics, economies, and ecologies.

Book Detail

Introduction: Olivia Angé and David Nally

Part I: Producing Tubers

• David Nally: The Political Ecologies of the Potato in Ireland
• Richard Scaglion: The Sweet Potato: Stimulating Agricultural Innovation in the Pacific Islands
• Roy Ellen: Cassava and Colonialism: How a Diasporic Cultigen was Reinvented in the World System
• Karl Zimmerer: Producing Potatoes and Tuberous Kin in the Andes and Beyond: Vegetal Affordances and Biodiversity in the Plantationocene

Part II: Living with Tubers

• Marilyn Strathern: ‘A Question of Life and Death’: Imagining Tropical Tubers
• Mark Mosko: The Sacrifice of the Yams: Yams, Human Procreation, and Chiefly Hierarchy in the Trobriands
• Carlos Fausto: Could Manioc Have Been a Root of the State? An Economy of Grandeur in Amazonia
• Nancy Ries: Potatoes, Politics, and War: Household Potato Growing across Postsocialist Eurasia

Part III: Knowing Tubers

• Olivia Angé: Reclaiming Tuberous Kin. Interspecies Poetry and Potato Cosmopolitics in the Peruvian Center of Domestication
• Lewis Daly: The Living Gift: Cultivating Landscapes of Memory in Indigenous Amazonia
• James Leach: Knowledge, and its Limits, in a Rai Coast Garden
• Gerry Kearns and Karen Til: Tuberous Epistemologies: Persons, Precarities and Potatoes in Art