Valuing the Bad and the Ugly: Tasting Agrobiodiversity Among the Indigenous Canela

Abstract

The Indigenous Canela of northeast Brazil cultivate a diversity of crops that are variously categorized as good and beautiful (impej), bad and ugly (ihkên), tasty, bland, and even regular or common (cahàc). Through an analysis of Canela crop categorization and human–plant encounters, the article demonstrates that valuing agrobiodiversity, including less delicious or bad crops, is grounded in an understanding of crop intentionality or subjectivity in garden spaces. An examination of Canela yam and manioc varietals in particular reveals that crops, as intentional subjects, are valued for the multisensory engagements they develop with each other and with their human counterparts in the emergent bio-sociocultural life-world. By drawing from and expanding upon recent approaches in multispecies ethnography and sensory anthropology, a Canela taste for agrobiodiversity emerges, one that incorporates not only the taste of delicious or less palatable food, but also multiple sensory modalities of myriad humans and plants as they strive to care for one another in garden spaces.

Keywords:

• agrobiodiversity
• multispecies ethnography
• sensory anthropology
• Indigenous people
• Brazil
• taste
• value

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, the author would like to thank the Canela people and plants whose intertwined lives continue to fascinate and surprise her, especially her main research assistants Liliana, Fernando, Renato, and Leandro. Thanks are also extended to the author’s doctoral advisor, Laura Rival, and her postdoctoral advisors Joshua A. Bell and William Crocker. The author additionally thanks the participants of the original conference panel at the 2014 American Anthropological Association meeting that inspired this special issue, and gives special thanks to Greg de St. Maurice for his vision and collaboration for the AAA panel and this special issue. Finally, thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful and thought-provoking commentary.

Notes

1. Canela names have been changed from their originals.

2. Unlike other Jê-speaking communities in Brazil such as the Xavante that have experienced higher rates of obesity and associated health issues as a result of greater access to processed and industrialized foodstuffs (see Welch et al. 2009), the Canela have not. Most Canela women and men have relatively limited purchasing power to acquire processed foods.

3. The pànkrỳt category most likely includes the following species: Phaseolus vulgaris (common bean), Phaseolus lunatus (lima bean), other species in the Phaseolus genus, Vicia faba (fava bean), and species in the Vigna genus.

4. While Canela yam varietals are currently only identifiable by genus (Dioscorea sp.), they may belong to Dioscorea trifida, a species which is native to the Americas.

5. Placing crops in multiple, overlapping categories is common in Canela ethnobotanical classification and categorization schemas in general, which are often layered (see Crocker 1990, 325–328). In this case, the dual opposition of “regular yam” vs. “good yam” also opens to form a triadic schema of regular–good–best yam. For a deeper analysis of Jê-speaking communities’ transformations of dualisms into triads, see Ewart (2013, 19–24) and Miller (2015, 303–323).