Description: Focusing on the intimate relations that develop between plants and humans in the northern rural region of El Salvador, this book explores the ways in which more-than-human intimacies travel away from and return to the milpa through human networks. The chapters present innovative methodological and conceptual contributions to the study of relationships that form between plants and people.
Review Quotes: "This evocative book explores more-than-human intimacies in the marginal milpas in El Salvador. The seamless blending of methodological innovations, reflexive writing, and ontological openness provides a powerful example of how scholarship might decenter what John Law calls the 'one-world-world, ' while richly attending to connections between people and plants. Kneeling Before Corn is an innovative work that will appeal as much to those interested in agroecology as new materialist theory."--Terese Virginia Gagnon, co-editor of Moveable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory
"The book provides a historical and anthropological background of the study region and details the ethnographic methods (including an active participatory approach called recuperative observation) that the authors used to collect and analyze information from the community. These methods reveal a shift from fire toward agrichemical use to control weeds and fertilize crops, along with the health and cultural repercussions of this shift."--A. L. Mayer, CHOICE Connect