Lesley Head, Jennifer Atchison, and Alison Gates. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. xiii and 232 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, appendices, bibliography, index. $99.95 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4094-3787-1).
This is a book about the multitudinous ways that wheat is entwined in our lives (the title is a play on words). It represents an earnest attempt to treat domesticated plants as our equal partners—“playuhs,” to use the hip-hop term—rather than patronizing them, and to point the way toward a more inclusive theorizing, within human geography, about human–environment relationships. The lead author is an Australian whose early research was on aboriginal fire ecology, employing approaches that were at least partly scientific. Subsequently, Head became a cultural geographer. Thus, her career straddles a disciplinary divide that can be difficult to negotiate. This volume does not ignore the evolutionary and biological aspects of wheat, but the primary focus, and the bulk of the literature review, is in terms of social theory. This reviewer is a biogeographer, and thus a scientist, professionally, but philosophically a Taoist since age thirteen. I have only an incidental familiarity with critical social theory. This review is from an evolutionary and a Taoist perspective; it seems to me that these perspectives have something to offer to scholars such as Head, Atchison, and Gates.
The early chapters do a careful job of laying out the theoretical currents and trends within which Ingrained is situated. For several decades, agency has been a central concept within critical social theory. As I understand it, the point is that the oppressed are not merely victims, but can and do operate to further their own interests. The motive for much of this discourse appears to be at once both antidiffusionist and egalitarian, thus entangling Enlightenment idealism with the Sauerian debate. Subsequently, some geographers and others extended the concept of agency to animals, especially domesticated ones. The motive again appears to have been egalitarian. Still more recently, a few scholars have argued for extending agency to trees and perhaps other plants. Head, Atchison, and Gates further develop the argument for “plantiness” as a quality or bundle of qualities to be viewed with respect, with reference to domesticated species such as wheat. They emphasize that the domestication of wheat, and other crops was (and still is, because it is ongoing) a joint process in which the plants affected humans at least as much as vice versa. The authors provide a rather cursory treatment—albeit one that cites all the key references—of the early history of this process, and then a far more detailed discussion of the extremely complex and nuanced relationships between wheat (or wheats, as there are several species, let alone varieties) and modern Australians.
This reviewer found the literature review informative, but also bemusing. The concern, quite clearly, is to avoid marginalizing others, be they people, species, or perspectives. Yet two perspectives that could have informed this work are given short shrift because they are marginalized among critical society theory adherents: evolutionary theory and Sauerian geography. The authors' strenuously sincere attempt to persuade the reader of plant agency seems rather beside the point when there already exists within biology a perfectly suitable concept and associated body of theory, encapsulated in the term coevolution. Coevolution inherently grants respect to all players in the interaction—that is why it is “co”! Domestication is a coevolutionary process, as any evolutionary biologist would attest. Similarly, the authors clearly wish to avoid demeaning other species and even the Earth as a whole—they refer to the aborigines' notion of “country” as an entity with its own agency, although they do not develop the point (pp. 31–32). But this is little different from the Sauerian emphasis on landscape as the product of human–nature interaction.
The authors argue otherwise:
Of course there are long traditions within cultural geography of studying human relations with plants and animals for example in the work of Carl Sauer (1952). The key difference … is [the current approach's] emphasis on relationality and multiple agency; that categories and configurations of human entanglement with the nonhuman world (for example, domestication) are not pre-existing givens, but become and are worked out in a process of relation. (pp. 17–18)
This seems far more appropriate as a critique of most anthropological and botanical theorizing about domestication than with respect to Sauer. Sauer did stress relationality, although in specific environments and with specific types of plants; that is, an environmentally nuanced relationality. In contrast, the anthropological stance on domestication and agricultural origins tends to treat it all as bound to happen, possibly due to population growth or technological advancement, and to ignore differences between environments and species, and for that matter, historical contingencies.
Associated with the authors' concern to grant agency to those on the periphery is a feeling that dualism is problematic, to put it mildly. Several passages are illustrative:
contemporary agri-food geographies aim to work across, and eventually dismantle, a set of binary oppositions that have marked the field: culture and nature; conventional and alternative agriculture; global and local processes; production and consumption; political economy and cultural approaches; foci on materiality and representation. (p. 9)
The point of going beyond binaries is not to get rid of difference, … but to ensure that it is carefully explicated on the basis of empirical evidence, rather than categorized from above, and that it does not automatically translate into a hierarchy. (p. 15)
[We] are interested in understanding the world in an associative rather than separationist way. (p. 12)
Finally, there is the book's concluding sentence:
If the conceptualisation and practice of agriculture is so deeply implicated in the culture/nature binary in Western thought, it is possible that rethinking agriculture—and finding better ways to practise it—will be an important part of reconfiguring the damaging ontologies of modernity. (p. 197)
The binaries to which Head, Atchison, and Gates allude are Cartesian in nature. In contrast, consider the yin–yang symbol: associative rather than separationist, nonhierarchical, and not oppositional in the Western sense. The symbol is normally perceived to be about gender, and the culture–nature binary is conceptualized similarly within Taoism. It is not dualism that is the problem; it is the way dualisms have been conceptualized in the West, ever since Descartes (at least). On the other hand, evolutionary biologists have demonstrated that a characteristic human trait is “us versus them thinking,” and apparently it is genetically hard-wired. Consequently, even when attempting to avoid false oppositions, we engage in them, as Head, Atchison, and Gates do in categorizing binaries as “damaging ontologies.” Admittedly, I am doing the same here in asserting that Taoism gets dualism “right,” whereas the West does not.
The bulk of the book details wheat–human relationships in Australia, incorporating the authors' field research featuring interviews with farmers and others in the wheat distribution chain. These chapters are ultimately connected to current concerns, in particular over climate change, with policy recommendations. If an American research team were to write a similar book, it might be about corn (maize), which is our primary crop, in contrast to Australia, where wheat is king. In the United States, environmentalists are increasingly exercized about corn, for several reasons: the huge amounts fed to livestock versus the notion of “eating low on the food chain” (moreover, the animals typically become less rather than more nutritious when fed grain in stockyards); the ethanol scam; the spread of genetically modified corn and the role of agribusinesses such as Monsanto; and the increasing prominence of high-fructose corn syrup. The latter in particular has led many to publicize the remarkable number of foods and other substances that contain corn, and to question if this is a good thing.
Similarly, in Australia wheat is used in a great variety of products—not quite as many as are made with corn in the United States, but probably more than the also large number of U.S. wheat products—and the authors go to considerable length to document this fact. I believe most U.S. readers will find this unsurprising now that the word is out about corn in the United States.
Another theme to emerge from the later chapters is the complexity of decision making that must occur around wheat, among farmers, bakers, distributors, investors, and so on. But this also is unsurprising, surely! Because the researchers were able to have conversations with the people, but not the plants, the concerns of the former come to the forefront, and wheat unfortunately ends up backgrounded—contrary to the authors' intention. The discussion on climate change is good, with the authors pointing out that most climate adaptation initiatives are top-down rather than including the individual farmers in the policymaking process.
Ultimately, though, Ingrained suffers from the fact that despite its authors' goals, it views wheat from the human side rather than really giving the plants a voice, and because by being so thoroughly ensconced within critical social theory it marginalizes other perspectives that could help to illuminate this particular tale. To provide an example of what I am hinting at, consider the following: Bread wheat (the most widely consumed type of wheat) is a new species, originating about 7,000 years ago as the result of spontaneous hybridization plus polyploidy (chromosome doubling) between cultivated emmer wheat and a wild goatgrass. Because the latter was comparatively cold tolerant, bread wheat was better suited to northern latitudes than to the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean region where Western agriculture began. Unlike emmer, bread wheat also is poorly suited to being cooked as a gruel, but is well-suited to being ground for flour, with its high gluten content that lends itself to producing raised bread. In the Near East, the waterwheel was invented to grind grain into flour, but there never were very many because there are few rivers and because emmer and durum do not need to be ground into flour (although durum often is ground for pasta). As the waterwheel diffused north into Europe, it came into environments increasingly suited to it; in England, every valley had a stream that ran year-round and could support a waterwheel, which was also useful because bread wheat was the cereal best suited to the English environment. There was one upshot: the Industrial Revolution, which began as a series of inventions modifying the waterwheel in the context of mining coal. So wheat is indeed ingrained in our lives, to a degree that possibly far exceeds what Head, Atchison, and Gates had envisioned!
Here we have several diffusions—of bread wheat, of the waterwheel, and of the Industrial Revolution—interconnected, which is problematic for critical social theory. Because critical social theory originated in the humanities, and diffused into geography, it brought with it a nongeographical (antidiffusionist) theory of culture. I have no problem with agency when the motive is egalitarian, but when it is antidiffusionist it becomes fatally flawed. Rather than simply accepting the hegemony of the invading theory, geographers should be employing their agency to assert the significance of diffusion in human affairs.