Plant-people intimacies — Sage Perspectives Blog

By Cristiana Bastos

We are quite familiar with the history of the domestication of plants by humans; we know about cultivation, agriculture, selection, crops, transgenics, gardens, harvests, greenhouses, hydroponics, restorative cultures, you name it. But what about the domestication of humans by plants? In the article “Plant-people intimacies” I discuss that while humans produce plants via agriculture, plants also produce people; mediated by the plantation, plants produce humans, first as labor, then as race. Sugar canes, pineapples, coffee, cocoa, cotton, and other plants, through the enslaved, indentured, contracted or precarious labor of humans, generate ranks, ethnicities, racializations, cognitions, collective histories. Sugar better epitomizes how a plant species shaped human “races.” In the Caribbean-American world, sugar plantations turned a diverse multitude of African men and women and their descendants into the single category of “black” via enslavement and bonded labor, making a color equate to a positionality in a hierarchized system that also made “white” mean entitlement and non-labor. Race became the legacy of the plantation, once inscribed in the pseudo-sciences of racialism, later dismissed by sciences, yet insidiously present in words and actions that kill, insult, damage, hurt, exclude. Such legacy expanded beyond the black-white racialized dichotomy as other modes of turning humans into sugar laborers colorized them as brown or yellow or off-white in moveable hierarchies that put them apart for the duration of their indenture and remained with them through generations.

And yet, while plants produced people as racialized groups via plantation labor, plants also raised above the plantation as partners to humans in a wide range of intimacies – from the dread amassed in the callous and wounding labors with cotton spikes and sugar canes, to the loving commonality and complicity with specific plants. In the article “Plant People intimacies” I explore how two plant-species became embedded in the collective history and identity of some plantation laborers in Hawaii: sugar canes for Madeirans, pineapples for Azoreans. Madeirans and Azoreans, like the Japanese, Chinese, and, later, Korean, Puerto Rican and Filipino workers were brought to Hawaii under labor contracts for a sugar economy that emerged from a slow but steady taking over of land by the “haoles” (whites – descendants from U.S. missionaries), while Hawaiian population declined in great numbers. The assorted workforce of incoming migrants generated a diverse society which was eventually depicted by sociologists of the 1920s as close to a multi-racial paradise. But this was also a colonial settler society of sorts, with migrant settlers and their descendants coexisting with indigenous Hawaiians in a structural tension about land, belonging, crops, rights, politics. Through the process of settling in, first as plantation laborers, then as farmers, ranchers, merchants, professionals, rural or urban dwellers, different groups negotiated their collective identities between the existing stereotypes and their own celebration of distinctiveness. Among the usual ethnic markers like religion, housing style, music, dance, food, there is also a connection with specific plants that occasionally emerges among the different groups, be it on a reference to elected edible vegetables and domestic garden plants, or be it in the spelling out of a special bond with the very crops that made them plantation laborers and migrant settlers in Hawai‘i in the first place. In the article I explore the travels of sugar canes and of pineapples around the world, accidentally involving each of the three archipelagos – Madeira, Azores, and Hawaii; I equally explore how the narratives of connection to each of those crops provide among descendants a meaning for the long-distance displacement of their ancestors. Along the way, I bring in some visual vignettes of the contemporary cultures (as cultivation and as cultural display) of sugar cane in Madeira and of pineapples in the Azorean island of S. Miguel.

Read the article

Article Details
Plant-people Intimacies: Sugar Canes, Pineapples and the Memory of Migration in Hawai‘i
Cristiana Bastos
DOI: 10.1177/02780771231221643
Journal of Ethnobiology

About the Author

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Cristiana Bastos (CUNY 1996) is an anthropologist whose interests intersect anthropology, social history, and the social study of science, technology and medicine. She has worked on epidemics, colonial medicine, plantation societies, labor, racializations and, more recently, on plant-people connections. A senior researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, she coordinate the ERC project “The Colour of Labour – the racialized lives of migrants” with ethnographic and historical research in the Guianas, Hawai‘i, Mauritius, S Tomé, industrial New England and contemporary agrobusiness in Europe.