Intimate Relations: multispecie stories of manioc social life

Abstract

Manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz) is a way of life that gives us the opportunity to rethink agricultural production and thus provides a divergent understanding of the human domestication of plants. In the traditional literature about manioc, its evolution has been recognized as a process of domestication, the control of a biological species by humans or through “the paradigm of human exceptionalism.” In this paper we seek possible ways to tell another story about manioc and its human and non-human companions: a partial and modest testimony among many possibilities found between the biological and anthropological worlds. We argue that the domestication model is only a particular Western mode of telling the story and forming relations with maniocs. To contrast this we see the possibility of opening our minds to another story, to describe the human-manioc relation as an intimate relationship in which all elements are agents, and simultaneously objects of action. Maniocs are bodies-in-movement, growing and developing in the formation of multi-species landscapes. We understand this intimate relationship, as Donna Haraway explains, as a sympoietic story, a process of “becoming-with” that occurs in the flow of life.