- Page 2: Is the sociology of science ‘anti-science’?
- Page 3: Attempt at an ethnographic memo: The beep-to-calories boundary
- Page 4: An ethnomethodological description of racial harassment
- Page 5: Multisensory rambling on corn
- Page 6: The impact agenda in UK universities
- Page 7: A reflective memo on prenatal screening
Multisensory rambling on corn
I am shopping at my local supermarket. Fruits, porridge, oat milk. I like my greens, but this time I go for yellow: cans of sweet corn. Walking home, in the grey of Cardiff, words I heard years ago struck me: “The settler colonial gaze on maize”. This stuff I’ve just bought has a history, entangled with human stories made of power relations and social arrangements. And this stuff is food, it’s colourful, it has a feel, a smell, a flavour, even a sound.
This multisensory memorandum is an attempt to access the stories of corn through senses, inspired by some sociologists’ call to pay “attention to the social world within a wider range of senses and placing critical evaluation and ethical judgement at the centre of research craft” (Back and Puwar 2012, p.15). I am also thinking with the scholars who helped us notice that objects, organisms, materials, cultures, bodies, technologies and social relations are all entangled (Winner 1980; Latour 1993; Ingold 2002; Jasanoff 2004).
The can
Back home, drawing from the material turn, that “attests to the centrality of materials and materiality in the constitution of social relations” (Woodward 2016), I take the idea of “object interview” quite literally. Somehow in the vein of Knowles who tells stories of globalisation through the trail of flip-flop manufacturing (Knowles 2014), I set out to interview this can of sweet corn, giving it agency in our interaction and the knowledge that comes out of it.
I tap the can, smell the tinplate, lick the label, run my fingers on the rim, pay attention to the colours. Many stories come to mind. Then I action the pull tab. Plop-crrrr. Once the can is opened, I meet the bright yellow kernels. I take one in my hand, it is cold and wet, with an earthy smell. Its taste is sweet and fresh, it is crunchy and slightly chewy. It calls for salt, olive oil and lemon. An open can has sharp bits. The interview may end up with my tongue or finger cut, and bits of me would get into the stuff. But the red of blood is a stark reminder of how corn can tell us a thing or two about capitalism and colonialism.
Stories of Corn
Corn, or maize, is originally from the Americas, one of the main crop for the indigenous populations, cultivated for at least 9000 years (Staller et al. 2006). Last century, scientists found a way to create a kind of corn with a higher yield (Berlan 2018). The seeds had been manufactured in such a way that if the farmers wanted to secure the high yield they had to buy the seeds from the manufacturer every year, instead of using the ones their harvest would produce. Taking the seeds off the farmers’ hands, where they had been for millenniums, was a significant anthropological change. It also secured constant profit for manufacturers (Berlan and Lewontin 1986).
Corn stands as an iconic example of the so-called Green revolution, the way the West industrialised agriculture and imposed its model internationally from the 1940s (Eddens 2019). Meddling with the sweet corn kernels, I am surprised at how homogenous they look; same size, shape, crispiness and colour. A perfect calibration, witness of the Green revolution’s mass production of standardized crops and animals. Closer to us, the creation of genetically modified corn illustrates further the specific Western way of relating to food production and the planet: capitalist, extractivist, colonialist and techno-centrist (Bonneuil 2015; Peña et al. 2017; Hernandez-Lopez 2020). This is the model that the Gates’ foundation is currently pushing in the African continent (Zaitchik 2023).
I am then reminded of the “settler colonial gaze on maize”, the words told by Peña while reflecting on an image taken from a 1980’s publication by a prominent biologist (Peña 2020). The image contrasts small and weak-looking ancestral varieties of corn to the massive and phallic modern corn of Western science (Fig.2). My everyday shopping unearthed a buried memory of a researcher using visual methods to illustrate how scientific representations of a staple food tell stories of imperialism. Here, the multisensory and multimodal methods unravel tales of wide sociocultural contexts, creating a “new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds” (Hurdley and Dicks 2011). For Peña, a Mexican professor, the colonial gaze not only serves to justify the Green revolution but also obfuscates other realities of corn (its ancient and traditional diversity, some were as big as the modern corn) and other kinds of relations between people and corn (not centred on exploitation and profit making) (Peña 2020).
Homage to the interviewee
I’ve finished the can of corn.
It is a small quantity, but also strangely addictive. This has probably to do with the sweetness of sweet corn, a corn that was intensely selected and shaped to achieve a high sugar content, and called Zea mays convar. saccharata var. rugosa (Zea for short).
How unsettling it is to eat your interviewee… Once my partner in crafting research, the sweet corn is now part of me. It has participated to my sustenance, willingly or not. Zea’s dramatic fate reminds me of the terrible and moving story of OncomouseTM, as told by Haraway (Haraway 2018). OncomouseTM is a lineage of mice created by technoscience in the 1980s, a transgenic breast-cancer model for medical research and the first mammal ever patented. Zea and her industrial corn sisters are, like OncomouseTM, many things: living beings, commodities, patents, agricultural models etc. Their natural habitats are the intensive monocultures, the impoverished soils filled with pesticides and herbicides, the factories and, ultimately, the tinplate cans. Zea is “our scapegoat … [and w]hether [we] agree to her existence and use or not, s/he suffers, physically, repeatedly, and profoundly” so that we can eat (Haraway 2018, p.79) .
Conclusion
From an everyday object, and through a multisensory approach, I have tried to notice the stories that the object and I created as we interacted. From a can of sweet corn bought in a supermarket, Live methods can elicit other ways of knowing through paying attention to materials and their properties (Back and Puwar 2012), generating accounts of industrialisation and capitalism, biotechnologies and technoscience, colonisation and exploitation but also, maybe, touch on potential alternative ways of relating to non-human organisms.
References
- Back, L. and Puwar, N. 2012. A Manifesto for Live Methods: Provocations and Capacities. The Sociological Review 60(1_suppl), pp. 6–17. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02114.x.
- Berlan, J.-P. 2018. Hybrid corn and the unsettled question of heterosis. Journal of Genetics 97(5), pp. 1075–1082. doi: 10.1007/s12041-018-1037-2.
- Berlan, J.-P. and Lewontin, R.C. 1986. The Political Economy of Hybrid Corn. Monthly Review, pp. 35–47. doi: 10.14452/MR-038-03-1986-07_5.
- Bonneuil, C. 2015. Le siècle du gène. In: C. Bonneuil et D. Pestre (dir), Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. 3. Un siècle de technosciences (depuis 1914). Paris: Seuil, pp. 297–317.
- Eddens, A. 2019. White science and indigenous maize: the racial logics of the Green Revolution. The Journal of Peasant Studies 46(3), pp. 653–673. doi: 10.1080/03066150.2017.1395857.
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- Hernandez-Lopez, E. 2020. Gmo Corn, Mexico, and Coloniality. Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law 22(4).
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- Knowles, C. 2014. Flip-flop: a journey through globalisation’s backroads. London: Pluto Press.
- Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
- Peña, D.G. 2020. Gene-drives and Indigenous Seed and Food Sovereignty – The case of Zea mays. Prepared for CRISPRCon 2020, Indigenous perspectives on genomic research and gene editing in health and agriculture. 3 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzMq5jMy9j0 [Accessed: 27 April 2024].
- Peña, D.G., Calvo, L., McFarland, P. and Valle, G.R. eds. 2017. Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives. University of Arkansas Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctt1t89jww.
- Staller, J.E., Tykot, R.H. and Benz, B.F. eds. 2006. Histories of maize: multidisciplinary approaches to the prehistory, linguistics, biogeography, domestication, and evolution of maize. Amsterdam ; Boston: Elsevier Academic Press.
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- Zaitchik, A. 2023. The New Colonialist Food Economy. 18 September. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/new-colonialist-food-economy/ [Accessed: 1 October 2023].