Underground Inspirations

Tuber Sciences and Their Histories

Bibliographic Data

ID3571971
AuthorsFrancesca Bray (0000-0002-3248-7787, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume112
Issue3
Pages548-563
Publication date2021-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIsis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/715436
OpenAlexW3194881762
LanguageEN
References cited36

Taking tuber sciences and their histories as a case study, this essay hinges on materiality, both as a condition shaping thing–human relations and as a vector for producing knowledge and generating theory. It explores how people have made knowledge about some very earthy, solid, rooted, underground things: namely, tuber crops—yams, sweet or white potatoes, manioc, and taro. Unlike the waving seas of wheat and other grand global crops that sustained the rise of our modern world, tubers were almost invisible in history of science and technology until very recently. Anthropologists, however, have been thinking with tubers, recording how humans understand and work with them, and building theories about materiality and society from these observations for over a century—and they continue to be a vibrant source of inspiration to anthropologists of materiality today. The essay discusses the contexts in which different ways of knowing-through-tubers, vernacular and academic, have been formulated and asks what inspiration these tuber tales might offer to historians of science

Aesthetics · Art · Coproduction · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Social science · Sociology · Vernacular · Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

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