Interspecies Ethnography

The SeedsValue involves ethnographic fieldwork to document seed practices in three areas of intense agrobiodiversity. At each site, a team of researchers participates in agricultural life in highland and lowland fields to document practices of value creation unfolding through plant human encounters.

We draw inspiration from interspecies scholarship that studies “the host of organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds” ( Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 545). Famously introduced by Donna Haraway, the notion of companion species powerfully encapsulates such heterogenous form of sociability. Haraway invokes etymology to help us grasp the stake of her concept: cum panis refers to those who share bread, and work together (2008). Our companions include multiple organisms of all sizes and shapes whose lives are entangled with our composite self, both inside and outside our body. Cum panis par excellence, food plants offer particularly revealing guides for exploring the complex interactions through which relatedness across species is enacted. With this notion, Haraway unsettles Western conceptions of subjectivity by insisting that such companionship shapes the partners’ existence in the world, insisting that “becoming is always becoming with—in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake” (2008, 244).

Ethnographic accounts of potato, maize and rice in the field sites involved suggest that these plants are treated as beings endowed with a subjectivity of their own, sometimes acknowledged as an ancestor or a child to the people who cultivate them. However, there has been no sustained investigation into these embodied modes of transspecies companionship. The SeedsValues explores the texture of human-seed relatedness in order to illuminate processes of intersubjective creation across species, as well as the repercution of their participation to capitalist worlds that only conceives edible plants in terms of “crop”.

Acknowledging the limitations of ethnographic methodology for exploring collectives including vegetal beings, the SeedsValues uses artistic engagement to deepen our perception of seeds’ importance. We experiment with botanical drawing, the tracing of vegetal expresivity and forms of subversive inventorying.