Work

“The pandemic came to teach us how to eat”: COVID‐19, mutual vulnerability, and native corn in Oaxaca

Year: 2023

Type: article

Abstract: The COVID‐19 pandemic has been a period of inflection in the growth of native corn revivalism in Oaxaca, Mexico. New businesses opened selling food and drinks derived from native corn, events such as seed‐swaps were inaugurated, and farmers who had previously grown hybrid corn began experimenting with native seeds. This revivalism was not merely commercial or gustatory, but entailed a re‐evaluation by revivalists of their relationship to native corn. Such relationships became increasingly framed through mutual vulnerabilities. In this article I argue that native corn revivalism is a direct response to the COVID‐19 crisis. I explore how vulnerability featured in my interlocutors’ tellings of the crisis, demonstrating that it offered an analytic through which they theorized and constructed relationships. This approach builds upon interpretations of crisis as narrative form, but turns its attention away from the power‐effects of crisis narratives to instead look to the relationships that such narratives engender.

Source: The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12710

Author: Owen McNamara

Institution: Université Libre de Bruxelles

Language: English

Topic: Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Subfield: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Field: Agricultural and Biological Sciences

Domain: Life Sciences

SDG: Zero hunger

Open Access status: green

Funder: H2020 European Research Council