How To Interview a Plant

John Hartigan, 2018
“This chapter relates my efforts to regard several plants as ethnographic subjects, a project that proceeded rather awkwardly at first, then developed some momentum. I settled on the “how to” format because I hope my approach proves useful to others and also conveys the experimental aspect of this undertaking. My ethnographic project involved the usual steps: read the literature, find a site, proceed to analyze, and so on. The shift comes in trying to account for life forms directly, rather than their representations in human knowledge systems. It seems to me that multispecies ethnography fundamentally must narrate life—that is, describe and analyze life forms in their social relations. I attempt that here, partly by accessing the expertise of botanists, but also by turning toward “thin description,” an approach that shifts away from ethnography’s traditional investment in “thick description.” This is the final chapter of Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity“ Shelving
Ecology