The World According to Amaranth: Interspecies Memory in Tehuacán Valley (original) (raw)
2019, Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time
In 20th century, amaranth has been rediscovered as crop that could defend vulnerable areas of the world from hunger due to its tolerance for drought and poor soil. It still constitutes a minor cereal crop in the global scale, but as a labor intensive and resilient plant that does not benefit much from pesticides or genetic modification but supplies high quality nutrition, it models an alternative to neoliberal pesticide-driven monocrop agriculture and factory farming. This paper rewrites the history of human relations with amaranth in one of its centers of origin, Tehuacán Valley (Puebla, Mexico) since the times of Aztecs, through its colonial demise, till its rebirth in Proyecto Alternativas, aimed at remediation of poverty due to drought. While doing this I transform Toledo and Barrera-Bassols’ (2009) concept of biocultural memory to consider this memory as a hybrid phenomenon formed through interactions between humans and plants and viewing plants’ adaptation strategies as “living thoughts” (Kohn, 2013).
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