On Labor and Creative Transformations in the Experimental Fields of the Philippines

Abstract

Through an ethnography of the C₄ Rice Project's sorghum experiment in the Philippines, this article analyzes particular practices in experimental rice fields and how rice researchers understand their work through specific material practices and engagements with the plants. Returning to the critiques of disembodied science, the author looks at the particular, situated, and subjective labor that researchers do in the fields to argue that these relationships offer different and richer ways to understand scientific knowledge production and practices. Drawing out a distinction between working on plants (the human as producer and plant as passive raw material) and working with plants (a process of humans and plants working together in a situated and particular relationship), the article offers an different approach to Marx's concept of labor by incorporating nonhumans as active and relational actors in the labor process. Labor, then, can be seen as a creative relationship between humans and nonhumans situated in particular times and places.

Keywords:

• plant-human relations
• labor
• situated science
• touching
• agricultural research

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and a grant from the Institute for Governmental Affairs at the University of California, Davis, as well as a graduate fellowship at the Center for Science and Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis. I thank the International Rice Research Institute for letting me conduct my fieldwork there, as well as members of the C₄ Rice Project, who graciously opened their doors to me as they became my object of study. I first shared these ideas at the Knowledge/Value Workshop at the University of Chicago—a special thanks to Kaushik Sunder Rajan and Mary Leighton. I must thank those who gave me crucial and critical feedback: Mario Biagioli, Joseph Dumit, Judith Farquhar, Michael Fisch, Mike Fortun, and Kristin Peterson. I would like to give a special thanks to Michelle Stewart and Jieun Lee for their labor, editing, and rereading and to two very helpful and generous reviewers.