Abstract
The history of capitalism features a number of glorified characters, such as Frederick the Great and Antoine Parmentier, lauded for contributing to national prosperity by purportedly introducing the prolific potato to the masses. This article redirects our attention toward vaunted varieties in the tuber population itself, which here are called tuberous heroes. While popularly dismissed as a humble crop, the potato has also been acknowledged as having changed world history for both the better and the worse. An analysis of these antagonistic evaluations reveals how struggles for the advent of tuberous heroism were also political campaigns for worlds to come. The concept of a partial example is introduced to account for the fragmented and situated tuber appreciation found at the center of potato domestication in Peru and is held in contrast to the agro-industrial search for supercrops. This exploration of shifting vegetal virtuosity highlights the ecological attunement of partial exemplarity when compared with the expected ubiquity of heroic and villainous crops. The contrast between heroic and partial exemplarity highlights how a plant becomes an ethical companion offering propositions for entangled flourishing.
European history features famous champions of the potato, such as Frederick the Great and Antoine Parmentier, who are credited with fostering national grandeur by feeding the masses. In her recent masterpiece on the politics of the potato, the historian Rebecca Earle has challenged the glorification of these so-called potato heroes by demonstrating the role of anonymous peasants in the propagation of Solanum tuberosum across Europe and beyond.1 This article furthers Earle’s study of the heroes of potato politics by directing attention toward outstanding varieties in the tuber population itself.
While popularly dismissed as a humble or rudimentary crop, the potato has also been acknowledged as having “changed the world’s history,” to use an often-quoted phrase from the historian William McNeill.2 In potato scholarship we are introduced to the tuber as both a “savior” and a “hopeless victim”; an “innocent” crop or “demoralizing esculent”; a source of happiness and misery; a symbol of “heroic continuity” and of “deterioration and decadence”; a “root of plenty” and a “villainous root” obstructing capitalism.3 In his classic volume The History and Social Influence of the Potato, the eminent potato breeder and botanist Redcliffe Salaman vividly encapsulated these sharply contrasting appreciations, remarking that the potato plays “a twofold part: that of a nutritious food, and that of a weapon ready forged for the exploitation of a weaker group in a mixed society.”4 More recently, James C. Scott has offered an alternative perspective by looking at potato as an “escape crop”—a staple of subversive communities evading subjugation by the state.5 Moving beyond human evaluations, he has attended to the vegetal potentialities that enabled the tuber itself to shape political history.6
This article considers the participation in the history of capitalism of certain varieties of tubers that are alternately credited for either prolific yields or massive destruction. In this endeavor, I travel with the potato over a centuries-long migration from its center of domestication in the Peruvian highlands to critical loci in the expansion of capitalist agro-industry. I track attributions of merits and failures in scholarship, mentioning authors who have qualified the capacities of the tuber as well as scholars who have reported that participants in their studies have considered tubers as heroes or villains. While tracing the potato’s itineraries, I introduce what I call tuberous heroes and villains: vegetal embodiments of exemplarity in the sense developed by Joel Robbins. In his elaborate analysis of moral life in a Urapmin community in Melanesia, Robbins defines “examples” as “cultural form[s] that realiz[e] a specific value to the fullest extent possible.”7 Likewise, heroes and villains are glorified or despised as the absolute incarnation of polarized values, for better or worse. Extending Robbins’s notion of exemplarity to vegetal beings, I unfold a heroic regime of plant appreciation in terms of their virtuosity and the perfection of value accomplishment. This heroic regime inherently implies the possibility of the negative evaluation of a villainous crop as the realization of decay “to the fullest extent possible.”
The exemplarity of the potato in the history of capitalist plantations contrasts with the nuanced appreciations I observed during my ethnographic work in the domestication center in Cuzco, Peru. There, the potato is certainly the most valuable crop to highland cultivators. As a generic crop, the potato embodies kallpa (Quechua, “strength”), a core virtue for both human and vegetal flourishing. Yet the study of exemplarity in the Andean “mosaics of territory” opens up new paths for the estimation of the vegetal accomplishment unfolding in specific agricultural relations.8 In this context, outstanding tubers emerge as examples akin to those introduced by Caroline Humphrey in her study of self-crafting in Mongolia.9 Humphrey’s interlocutors did not revere their exemplars through the application of a coherent and ordered normative script but rather by taking ad hoc inspiration from individually chosen figures. These may be living or historical heroes, as well as ordinary persons emerging in the life of a singular individual. As in this Mongolian process of ethical self-crafting, vegetal exemplarity in the Cuzco highlands entails the “casting of one’s actions in a subjectively new qualitative and intentional light.”10 Vegetal exemplars are thus brought forth through “situated knowledge,” in the sense proposed by Donna Haraway to assert the insight of partial perspective.11
To insist on a fragmented and situated modality for appreciation of the potato in the center of domestication, I introduce the concept of a partial example. In so doing, I move away from the botanical sense of exemplars as “individual plants that exemplify particular species or genera.”12 I explore partial exemplarity to shatter the potato’s homogeneity and account for its multiple potentialities. Thinking about vegetal examples as fragmentary may seem inconsistent with a conceptualization of exemplarity that emphasizes a horizon of perfection and objectivity; however, I argue that the notion of partial exemplarity is useful for capturing the ethical orientations proposed by the shifting virtuosity of ordinary vegetal selves. The minutia of partial exemplarity is, in fact, substantiated by etymological insights. In their recent defense of the empirical and heuristic importance of examples, Lars Højer and Andreas Bandak trace the roots of this word in the Latin eximere, which means the cut or incision that singles out or marks a detail.13 Comparison of the agro-industrial quest for heroic crops with the Andean cultivation of myriad partial examples reveals the ecological entailments of these contrasted regimes of appreciation.
This article teases out two modes of vegetal exemplarity, heroic and partial, by tracing the movements of the potato throughout the expansion of capitalist plantations. It focuses on two of the most disparate ecologies: the mosaic fields of the center of domestication in Peru and the monoculture of the European center of agro-industry.14 These contrasted potato collectives exemplify Haraway’s statement that “seeds are brought into being by, and carry along with themselves wherever they go, specific ways of life as well as particular sorts of dispossession and death.”15 Bringing forth incompatible worlds, tuber varieties in highlands communities and in the agro-industry offer particularly fertile ground for tracking the emergence of tuberous heroes or villains and the contrasting values they are meant to incarnate. Because controversy over the values to be enacted in the world is political in essence, examining the contested institution of vegetal heroes and villains casts light on the political ecologies brought forth by the championship of crop exceptionalism.16
Inspired by Haraway, María Puig de la Bellacasa has eloquently argued that scholars, too, are entangled in the worlds they think with. The worlds carried by the tubers are indeed entangled with my own as a native of Belgium, the world leader in industrially processed potato products. My relation to Solanum tuberosum began with the agro-industry. My work as an ethnographer in the Andes for about two decades opened up new sensibilities to vegetal beings. In 2022, I undertook an ethnographic collaboration with potato experts at an agro-biodiversity conservation initiative called Parque de la Papa (Potato Park) for the creation of what I named a “subversive seed catalog.” This collaboration supports my Andean partners’ call for “patchy ecologies” to resist capitalist world-making.17 In traversing potato collectives through time, I aim to create “diffraction” in regimes of potato appreciation, not to highlight the exceptionalism of crop heroism but rather to capture the virtuous fragmentation and the vulnerability of ordinary vegetal companions.18 In so doing, I shift away from heroic tales of empire and progress to explore histories from the margins. These feature unnoticed partakers who are silently “pressed into service in the tale of the hero,” as Ursula Le Guin eloquently lamented.19 Tuberous beings, we shall see, are significant protagonists to summon for the narration of collective making from the margins.
Potato Companionship in Precolonial Andean Collectives
According to archaeological records, hunter-gatherers began domesticating Solanum tubers between 8000 and 5000 BC around Lake Titicaca, some four thousand meters above sea level. In Andean scholarship on precolonial livelihood, the potato is lauded for its resistance to both extreme and highly variable climates, which made it a uniquely suitable plant to sustain human life in the highlands, where cereals could not prosper. Salaman advanced the idea that potato cultivation was a prerequisite for the ability of the Amazonian people to relocate from the rainforest and establish settlements in the highlands.20 The skillful work of domestication reduced their poisonous glycoalkaloid content and increased tuberization, providing highlanders with a livable diet offered by no other plant in the Andean peaks.21 The varieties emerging in this encounter relied in turn on human cultivation for their propagation. Over the past millennia, humans and potatoes have thereby become “companion species” coevolving in a relation of mutual dependence entailing both instrumentality and care—a relation that I further describe below.22 In this light, the potato has been vital to the composition of agricultural collectives in the Andes, before it became a strategic element of later state formation.
At this center of domestication, archaeological vestiges indicate that the potato served as a “state crop” suitable for food storage and elite extraction (elsewhere this role was usually performed by cereals).23 Historians and archaeologists most famously identified cultivation of the potato as critical to the expansion of the Incan imperial project. Following its transformation into chuño through a complex process of freeze-drying, the tuber could be stored for years and its lightness eased the burden of transport to wherever armies needed to be fed.24 Challenging a well-established belief that pre-Hispanic polities sustained patchy ecologies, which then fostered a wide range of diversity in Solanum tuberosum, Karl Zimmerer uncovered that the Inca state prioritized “quantity, not diversity . . . in the large-scale farming of potatoes.”25 The Incas are credited by Andean cultivators and scientists as having bred the Qompis, one of the most productive native variety in fields today. Yet the actual diversity of the highland potato, which cultivators acknowledge as inherited from precolonial times, reflects the range of varieties cultivated alongside the flagship imperial ones.
Clearly, the potato was not just an imperial crop but also a daily tuberous companion. Under the Incan empire, the potato’s vital importance was reflected in its ordinary veneration as Axomama, a daughter of Pachamama, this ubiquitous female ancestor who distributes earthly flourishing.26 The acknowledgment of potato-human interdependence also appeared in myth: the tale of the god Huatiacuri, renowned for feeding himself with tubers cooked underground, introduces the potato as the hero of a precolonial Andean world. The myth further recounts epic duels between Huatiacuri and his brother-in-law, who tried to banish Huatiacuri from the divine family for his embarrassing reliance on the potato. Despite his modest appearance, Huatiacuri demonstrated remarkable skill and ability to overcome his opponent in every contest. The Peruvian anthropologist Luis Millones interprets Huatiacuri as an incarnation of the potato itself, with extraordinary virtues veiled beneath a humble skin.27 In these mythological encounters, the potato and its eater are presented as heroes who incarnate strength “to the fullest extent possible.”28 At the same time, they are also depicted as villains, epitomizing destitution and deprivation. The myth suggests that potato consumption crafts human subjectivities as either honorable or pernicious. In fact, historians note that the potato was despised in colonial society as a villain that sustained the miserable livelihood of the uncivilized Indians.29 In the section that follows, I trace the journey of the potato on colonial ships to reveal how a plant despised as a villain by colonists came to be lauded as a hero of national prosperity at the dawn of industrial capitalism.
Tuberous Heroes and Villains in the History of Capitalism
Historical scholarship documents that when potatoes first arrived in Europe from South America in the sixteenth century, they were blamed for terrible calamities.30 Seventeenth-century elites, too, purportedly rejected the potato as a poisonous root whose subterranean existence indicated a devilish provenance. However, exceptional possibilities for propagation coupled with a subterranean existence that escaped the attention of tithe collectors and other predators also positioned the potato as “salvational nutrition”—a protector of peasants made destitute by the enclosure of the commons.31 Earle provides evidence that peasants were keen to welcome the newly arrived plant to their gardens, offering another instance of the potato as a simultaneous incarnation of both misery and bounty in collectives with opposing political positioning.32 In the eighteenth century, the elite classes reversed the villainy they had assigned to the potato; once consumption habits began to be used as statecraft, the potato emerged as the darling of political economists. Statesmen and intellectuals promoted the potato to facilitate its acceptance by peasants after centuries of supposed stubborn rejection. Figures such as Frederick the Great and Antoine Parmentier are featured in schoolbooks, museums, and even academic literature as national heroes, having introduced the prolific tuber to the German and French masses, respectively.
The patriotism attributed to these so-called heroes reflected the virtues of the potato in service of a powerful and prosperous nation.33 Advertised qualities were manifold. Adam Smith famously calculated that potatoes yield three times as much food as the same surface area planted in wheat.34 This bountiful production is coupled with a unique ability to adapt to multiple ecologies, including marginal soils.35 In addition to feats of cultivation, the potato was praised for its nutritional value. Potato champions trumpeted the addition of the potato to daily diets as essential to the development of healthy, vigorous bodies. A potato field, they claimed, offered a complete diet to a family if only complemented by milk. Later, chemical analyses revealed that the potato is “an exceptionally good all-round package of food,” providing nutrients that range from high-quality proteins to calcium, iron, phosphorous, and potassium as well as vitamins B and C.36 Expected nutritive benefits were so magnificent that the potato was promoted through public campaigns for population management.37
The potato is so nutritionally rich that historians position its abundance in northern Europe as a critical catalyst of the eighteenth-century demographic boom, which provided cheap labor to urban industries during the nascent stage of capitalism.38 But at the turn of the nineteenth century, public awe shifted into bitter critique: the potato was accused of excessive yield, inducing depravity among peasants content with pulling only tubers from the ground. The potato became the target of political economists’ criticism for the very same “superlative power” of propagation that was previously praised.39 Malthus famously blamed the potato for proliferating a miserable population, effortlessly fed with the bountiful tuber. No longer the “enlightenment superfood,” the potato was decried as a “villainous root” responsible for the moral perversion of the masses.40 While eighteenth-century intellectuals had admired the robustness of the bodies shaped by the potato, tubers became responsible for the crafting of depraved humans.41
It is in this context of pessimism that the invasion of the mold Phytophthora infestans induced a widespread blight that ruined yields for consecutive harvest seasons from 1845 to 1849. The spread of mold was fostered by reliance on the limited number of varieties that had been introduced from the Andes and adapted to European ecologies. Hosting Phytophthora, the potato became a modern monster who can “help us notice landscapes of entanglement, bodies with other bodies, time with other times.”42 The relation articulating this world-making monster is better described as parasitism than symbiosis; known to be detrimental to Solanum tuberosum flourishing in the mosaic of Andean plots, the mold became devastating in the monocultural fields of agricultural capitalism, where it spread with unprecedented velocity. If the whole continent was affected, nowhere was the situation as dramatic as in the fields of Ireland awash with the Irish Lumper variety. These monocultural fields were highly vulnerable to the thriving mold, which spread underground as well. Tuber extinction in Irish fields caused the deaths of more than one million people and triggered the massive exile of over two million Irish emigrants—mostly to the United States, where population demographics were reshaped by the potato’s exhaustion. This historical tragedy became known as the “potato famine,” positing this tuber as an agricultural villain blamed for the onset of a fatal degree of scarcity.
Recent investigation has further revealed that “vegetal delinquency” was imputed to the Irish peasantry itself for developing a dangerous dependence on malignant tubers. This accusation was an important factor in the decision of the governing elite to withhold lifesaving emergency aid.43 The accusation of vegetal villainy thus obscured the culpability of elites, who allowed millions of peasants to die by failing to implement emergency measures. Even if, as Michael Pollan points out, “it is not the potato as much as potato monoculture that sowed the seeds of Ireland’s disaster,” it is on the tuber that subsequent agricultural policies focused in order to prevent further calamities.44 A search began for a “super crop” able to overcome pest invasion in monoculture.45
Collecting Expeditions and the Quest for High-Yield Tubers
Research on the origins and reasons for the potato’s devastation laid the foundations for the discipline of phytopathology.46 Once the blight was identified as the degenerative culprit, the steady search for cure brought out the potato-cum-Phytophthora monster as a star catalyst for the development of the European agrochemical industry.47 Besides the elaboration of antifungal remedies, breeders were determined to find pest-resistant varieties in the descent of potatoes ordered from the Andean Cordillera after European strains were decimated by the blight.48 In the late nineteenth century, a new “order of potato agriculture” emerged with the development of experiments through artificial crossing and “pure line” breeding.49 Technologies to identify and stabilize the transmission of desirable traits narrowed scientists’ interest from species to genetic resources, triggering a worldwide genetic diversity rush. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Russians initiated “imperial gene-hunting expeditions” to establish centralized collections of cultivated plants in which the potato loomed large.50 Other nations followed their lead, and Nikolaï Vavilov, John Hawkes, and Carlos Ochoa gloriously feature in the botanical records as adventurous explorers who wandered the Cordillera for the sake of agricultural progress.
Experimentations in breeding stations have resulted in the creation of new varieties; some of these have gained national fame, like the British Maris Piper or the Peruvian Renacimiento, promoted as the best crop for industrial agriculture in their country. While the term “green revolution” is usually used in reference to the introduction of chemically responsive “miracle grains,” the potato was also targeted, with a range of breeds promoted as producing incredible yields.51 The value of green revolution heroes is measured in experimental fields according to the tons per hectare that they promise to yield. Vegetal heroism thereby emerged in monovaluation regimes of instrumental appreciation. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the extent of their spread started to arouse scientific anxiety about the loss of “agrodiversity.” Even if Vavilov had already warned of the dangers of monoculture, it was only in the 1970s that alarming statements of “genetic disaster” were made publicly and global policies of crop conservation were designed. While Andean tubers epitomize a uniquely diverse cornucopia crafted by cultivators through millennia, the potato was listed by early international conservation institutions as having “highest collecting priority” to address the loss of its genetic diversity to agro-industry.52
A solution was sought in the federation of transnational institutions devoted to the storage and management of the genetic material necessary for engineering new supercrops. Tagged as a highest priority crop, the potato earned its own research station with the establishment of the Lima-based International Potato Center (CIP) in 1971. The CIP has developed its own conservation facility, hosting the largest potato collection to date with an impressive 4,870 accessions registered.53 A gene bank usually follows capitalist regimes of monovaluation based on instrumentality: germplasm is stewarded for its potential to contribute to the creation of new, purportedly “improved” varieties.54 As high yielding as they can be, laboratory breeds have never been immune to blight, which continues to ravage impressive surfaces of fields in monoculture. The tremendous yields at the center of potato capitalism are conditioned by massive quantities of pesticides to overcome ever-more-virulent strains of Phytophthora; indeed, the potato industry has been villainized as the largest chemical consumer of all industrial crops.55
Among the different strategies developed by scientists to bolster P. infestans resistance, genetic manipulation is arguably the most controversial. If, since the 1970s, “hybrid seeds” have been broadly depicted as an “agricultural evil” by green revolution critics, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have raised further ecological anxieties.56 Civil opposition to the use of genetic engineering in food agriculture triggered a unique public resistance, which the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers coined the “GMO event.” With this term, she highlighted the political involvement of ordinary people who collectively compelled attention from the state and scientific authorities.57 In Belgium, this learning event manifested in the rallying of the Field Liberation Movement, whose participants entered an experimental plot in Wetteren to swap genetically modified P. infestans–resistant seeds for organic Sarpo Mira and Toluca seed potatoes. In 2011, eleven activists were arrested and sued in court, villainized by the Belgian criminal justice system. In 2014, the eleven self-denominated patatistes were finally acquitted with a huge degree of support from civil society.58 While the Wetteren project was expected to lobby against the villainization of transgenic organisms by a critical population, the polemic fueled by the Field Liberation Movement raised deeper suspicions regarding the potential of GMO technologies for salvation and shed light on its destructive potential instead. In a publication introducing two political plants “that have crafted people and mobilizations,” the patatiste and academic Barbra Van Dyck explains that, from the potato, she learned to compose new collectives triggering political controversy and opening up space for transformation.59 In this light, patatistes have found inspiration in the potato to enable new ecological associations.60 I read their story as the appreciation of Solanum tuberosum as an exemplar offering proposition for ethical positioning.
Facing the legal repudiation of their seeds in European agro-industry, GMO breeders oriented their business toward other prospective markets. In this vein, a consortium of potato magnates collaborated with the CIP to create a genetically modified breed by transferring three blight-resistant genes from Mexican and Argentinean wild potato varieties to the Victoria variety. The consortium aims to release the new R3Victoria on the Ugandan market, advertising it as a solution for hunger in a country with high levels of rural poverty. In claiming that its complete resistance to blight will “reduce costs associated with potato production, the losses caused by the disease, and farmers’ exposure to harmful chemicals,” the CIP markets its product as a sort of food security hero.61 In line with strategies developed to overcome the nineteenth-century famines, the introduction of a “superpotato” as a hero for eradicating poverty silences the enduring inequalities perpetuated by human politics of destitution. Such discourse feeds into the ongoing championing of the potato as a means to eradicate poverty in damaged ecologies—an imagery broadcast by international institutions. On a CIP webpage broadcasting the FAO International Potato Day declaration “to highlight the critical role of this tuber crop in fighting hunger and malnutrition,” the potato is said to be “crowned as the hero of the day.”62 In these potato campaigns, laboratory-engineered tubers are trumpeted to save the poor, while native landraces are only valued as materia prima for the creation of food-security heroes.
Conservation of Potato Diversity in the Cradle of Domestication
In the cradle of its domestication the potato remains a vital staple to growers. In her ethnographic research in the Ecuadorian Andes, Mary Weismantel reported that “the potato is the king” of community food.63 Self-sufficiency in potatoes requires more than just massive quantities; it also involves the cultivation of a diverse array of varieties, each appreciated for their particular qualities.64 Over the centuries, Andean cultivators have supported the diversification of their potatoes into more than four thousand varieties differing in shape, color, texture, and nutritional properties. Since the mid-twentieth century, the state and various nongovernmental institutions, including the CIP, have introduced newly bred varieties along with fertilizing packages to maximize potato yield in the highlands. The promotion of chemically swollen and evenly shaped breeds as conveyors of progress disqualified the virtues of small and thorny native varieties. The tuberous heroes designed for Peruvian agricultural modernization initially ignited the highland cultivators’ enthusiasm and quickly became popular in the lower fields.65 However, growers soon realized that the seed quality of the so-called “improved varieties” decreased after a few sowing campaigns, diminishing the harvested volume. These varieties also are highly vulnerable to pests if not bolstered with chemical repellents. The glorification of laboratory breeds in fact obscures the dreadful weakness of the so-called “improved potatoes” to withstand adversities if not boosted with chemical applications. Their yield is also deceiving in terms of tuber quality. Inflated with water, the tubers have a bland taste and brief conservation period that are a disappointment to their consumers.
As a result, only a few of the laboratory-bred varieties were integrated in the highland ayllus (agricultural collectives). The few that were adopted nonetheless tended to take up a significant proportion of the lower fields, particularly among households intending to reduce the labor required to perpetuate the native potato’s diversity or those intending to sell part of the harvest at the market.66 By the end of the twentieth century, a growing number of scientists had started to warn that these high-yield varieties were eroding highland pockets of germplasm diversity.67 Identified as an agro-biodiversity hot spot by conservation institutions, the region subsequently attracted multiple agricultural programs intended to propagate native varieties of Solanum tuberosum in highland habitats. In the district of Pisac, five hamlets established a partnership with the nongovernmental organization ANDES (Association for Nature and Sustainable Development), based in Cuzco, to initiate the Parque de la Papa in 2002. In 2004, they signed a launch agreement with the CIP to repatriate some four hundred virus-free seed tubers that had been collected across the region during the botanical expeditions mentioned in the previous section. The project has now achieved worldwide fame as a successful in situ conservation initiative, currently curating an impressive number of 1,362 varieties of native tubers. Unlike the seeds curated in the ex situ bank as genetic resources for the creation of ever higher-yielding varieties, landraces at the Parque de la Papa are preserved as a way to maintain a lively diversity in cultivators’ plots—and therefore the viability of highland potato livelihood.
However, agricultural activism in Pisac extends beyond numerical conservation targets. Cultivators from the member communities have protested the genetic manipulation of the potato ever since the Peruvian state began to consider the introduction of GMO products in 2011.68 The struggle resumed when the CIP announced its intention to market R3Victoria in Uganda in 2021. In response, ANDES published an information paper refuting the CIP’s appraisal of this new potato as a food security hero. Countering the charitable claim of delivering African farmers from poverty, ANDES argued that “genetically modified potatoes may prove lucrative for US and British billionaire investors, but are bad news for indigenous peoples and small farmers in Africa and the Andes.” In addition, it denounced the biopiracy of laboratory breeders who had used Digital Sequencing Information to avoid benefit-sharing with the original cultivators in the Andean center of biodiversity. This critique sheds light on the transnational political campaigns within which the identification of heroic crops is enmeshed, even when such heroes are put forth by their genitors as a technological feat in service of philanthropy.
In fact, potato cultivators in the Andes have contained P. infestans for centuries.69 Theirs is not a strategy of creating an heroic variety able to produce prolific yield regardless of its ecological entanglements. Instead, Andean cultivators prevent the diffusion of the pest by multiplying the number of varieties grown in their fields. The final sections describe the “patchy ecology” of the Andean domestication center and its manifold regime of potato appreciation.70
Self-Crafting across Species in the Highlands of Cuzco
The growers I met in the ayllus of Pisac dedicate a considerable amount of energy to making sure their tubers thrive. The verb uyway (Quechua, “to raise, to nurture”) embraces the set of sensorial communications aimed at potato flourishing. The same word applies to the raising of all kinds of beings, including humans. Cultivators affirm that potatoes need to be tended to as do their children. Like humans, potatoes are imbued with ánimu (Quechua, “spirit”), an attribute of vitality shaping the identity of living beings. Raising children and potatoes entails nurturing tasks for enlivening their ánimus and making sure it does not travel away from the tended body. In the case of potatoes, this is instantiated by the Papa Huatay, meaning “tying up potato” in Quechua. Fastening ánimu to tuberous bodies concretely consists of coating piles of tubers with straw and coiling lama wool rope around the heap. The spirit is then attracted with sahumeo (fumigation with smoke from incense or animal grease), to bring it back from the fields where it might have stayed.
As an effort by humans to care for potato ánimu, Andean agriculture invites us to extend the Foucauldian technologies of the self across species divide. This proposition has been articulated by John Hartigan in his analysis of maize selfing in a Mexican laboratory. Selfing is a modality of self-pollination of a plant that Hartigan understands as a technique of the vegetal self whereby a human is caring for species interiors. While Hartigan recognizes vegetal selfhood, it is, in his account, humans who act on plants’ beings.71 He explicitly contrasts his approach with the Foucauldian concern for practices operating on one’s own body or soul to transform oneself toward a certain state of flourishing.72 Native potato cultivation extends the techniques of the self to the vegetal realm in another direction. Potato uyway also is a work realized by humans to foster potato flourishing. Yet working with potato plants can be practiced as a technique to shape one’s self as an ethical being in the Foucauldian vein as well. This is not only true in the representational sense so richly documented by Anand Pandian in his study of “agrarian metaphors for moral self-cultivation” in India.73 In Pisac, agriculture contributes to human self-refinement through the embodied entanglements of kallpa (strength) fostered by eating and growing potatoes.
Living in high-altitude ayllus requires the consumption of food that provides sufficient energy to accomplish arduous tasks in the harsh conditions of the Cordillera. In the highlands of the Pisac district, potatoes consumed at every meal are expected to maintain people’s optimum physical conditions for field work. Furthermore, the very effort of cultivation strengthens the body. While shaping fit bodies, agriculture is a value-loaded activity where the quantity and quality of the harvest reflect the virtues of its cultivators. Those who are able to cultivate a wide array of potato varieties are famous among their neighbors and even beyond their own communities. My late friend Nazario Quispe, whose potato expertise was renowned beyond the area of the park, told me that growing a wide range of varieties—all with disparate demands—requires “a great mind, and patience.” The capacity to enhance plant diversity further strengthens appreciation of a human being characterized as loving and generous.74 Potatoes are indeed cultivated as ayllu members, whose careful nurturing is morally approved.
We find here yet another instantiation of human selves shaped by their tuberous companionship. If tending fields is listed by Foucault as a technology of the Western self, ánimus in the ayllu are not shaped through the cognitive examination prescribed by ancient Greek philosophers nor through the self-sacrifice requested by Christian discipline.75 Life in the Andean highlands is acknowledged as sacrificada (Spanish, “sacrificed”), but this qualification does not refer to self-renunciation for individual redemption. Self-sacrifice in potato cultivation implies arduous tending to another being’s growth to enhance mutual flourishing. This is the essence of uyway relations, including agricultural ones, where altruistic dedication is meant to foster sumaq kawsay (Quechua, “good life”), an Andean equivalent to Foucault’s “art of life.”76 Practiced as uyway, a technique of the self is thus an intersubjective relation in essence: caring for one’s self is enacted through the cultivation of someone else’s flourishing.
Investigating “earth beings” in the Cuzco highland, Marisol de la Cadena brightly captures uyway as mutual care from which heterogeneous entities emerge in the weaving of their ayllu. She insists that ayllu members do not preexist their interactions. They mutually constitute one another through relations of nurturing, composing the collective. I see potatoes as significant earth beings in the making of highland ayllus, where humans and tubers live in mutual interdependence. More than agricultural resources, potatoes in these collectives are ethical companions who offer virtuous propositions to orient the ecological positioning of their growers. In this light, they exist as exemplars akin to the human figures selected by Mongols in their ethical self-crafting. However, while Humphrey’s exemplars are not reported to be affected by their ethical standing, in the patchy plots of the Cordillera, humans and potatoes become virtuous highland dwellers in each other’s company; uyway shapes flourishing growers and tubers.77 The next section describes the kind of guidance offered by potatoes as ethical companions.
Potato Uyway and the Cultivation of Partial Examples
In the Pisac highlands, the plethora of animate potatoes is classified into culinary groups according to flesh composition—a tuberous materiality unfolding within webs of ecological relations that include pests, viruses, rodents, frost, and rain, as well as mountainous ancestors and Pachamama. Bitter tubers are intended for freeze-dried processing into chuño and moraya. They feature the most cold-resilient varieties suited for cultivation in the highest plots, potentially up to 4,800 meters above sea level, where few crops can survive. Their bitter peel offers protection against pests and other competitors with humans over potato consumption. The bonda papas are mostly round tubers that can be peeled with a knife before being cooked in soups and stews. They are considered more watery than the floury wayk’us, another group that includes tubers tasty enough to be eaten alone, peel and all, after baking or boiling. In fact, the wayk’u family comprises the widest array of tubers admired by growers and scientists for their resistance to the extreme ecologies of mountain peaks over 4,000 meters above sea level. Some even have a grade of alkaloid that is sufficiently high to repel pests but low enough for human consumption.
The Incan-bred Qompis are exceptional in that they can be peeled and boiled as bondas, while being tasty enough to be served as wayk’us. They furthermore top the rankings for productivity. While conversing with an agronomist in Pisac, I learned that it promises a yield of about 1,200 grams per plant—equivalent to the target harvest of laboratory breeds. This makes it a first choice for cultivating commercial fields, but growers’ appreciation goes beyond expectations of starch production. While the volume of tuberous production is one quality of potato classification, other traits such as frost resistance, pest repellency, ecological flexibility, cooking potential, or taste also matter. If Qompis are exemplary in terms of their high yield below 4,000 meters, they are less valued for taste when baked, frost resistance, or aesthetic qualities. Their appreciation indicates that a native tuber’s exemplarity is partial in the sense that it can be admired for a given virtue and deemed less worthy in many other regards.78
Unlike the mythical repertoire featuring Huatiacuri, the range of qualities considered in the appreciation of the actual potato precludes the stable identification of a single hero. Even if the potato, as a broad category of being, is an exemplary crop in the highlands, any generic notion of heroism shatters when we look at the fragmentation of ecological potential across multiple tuber bodies. As we were hiking to remote fields to earth up rows of growing plants, my collaborator Daniel Pacco pointed out a flourishing field of a potato called Cuchillo P’aki. Its name can be translated as “knife breaker,” emphasizing the outstanding kallpa that stems from the density of its flesh. He sketched a portrait of this variety that reflected the many expressions of its generic force: these potatoes are able to grow in all kinds of soils; they resist pests; they withstand cold; and, like the Qompis, they can be consumed as bonda as well as wayk’u or even chuño if convenient. While Daniel Pacco was fond of Cuchillo P’aki, he nonetheless cultivated about eighty other varieties in his fields as he appreciated the many qualities of a diverse cornucopia. Furthermore, a common potato in one field can achieve unusual feats in a nearby plot. The flourishing of a tuber depends on a variety of ecological conditions that include the grade of the slope, the orientation of the light, the presence of forager animals or pests, meteorological contingency, and the grower’s uyway. As with the tropical tubers that inspired Marilyn Strathern, the life of an Andean potato is “the outcome of relations and their activation.”79 Shifting in space and time according to the ecological situation in which it takes root constitutes another dimension of the native potato’s partial exemplarity. In line with Mongolian ideals, manifold tuber exemplars emerge continuously within this assemblage of ecological relations.
The relational exemplarity of native tubers is epitomized by the array of potatoes explicitly flagged as resaltantes (Spanish, “outstanding”). Most of them are wayk’u delicacies, but their taste has no decisive bearing on their standing, which is instead judged on the brightness of their color or characteristics of their shape. Their esteem is grounded in more than a visual aesthetic. In reality, the resaltantes are embodied icons of other beings whose shape they evoke: the Puma’s Hand (Puma Maki), Alpaca’s Noose (Pacocha Sinka), and Cat’s Claw (Michi Sillu). The shape of their subterranean bodies is uniquely related to the nontuberous species they partially incarnate and thus related to the humans who appreciate these animals. Still, not all animal icons are resaltantes. The Leqechu for instance are named after a bird whose shape they resemble. Leqechu is much appreciated, particularly as an ecological partner whose chants announce coming frost. After several hours spent describing varieties for the catalog, Daniel Perez was very excited when “we finally found the Leqechu,” as he celebrated. While he loved Leqechu for a number of qualities, this tuberous incarnation of a bird evidently did not muster collective admiration, as I was not instructed to flag this variety as resaltante in the catalog. During my inventory, I repeatedly inquired whether an examined potato was outstanding. When it came to the Puka Wamanero, the incarnation of an animal hunter of the Waman bird, Mariano Sutta patiently explained that this one is “not that resaltante, but it’s always good.” With these words, he kindly dissuaded my search for vegetal exceptionalism in outstanding varieties. I learned that resaltante is not an exclusive criteria for assessing tuber virtues; there can be no such criteria if a potato is, as indicated by Mariano Sutta, “always good.”
Acuity for partial exemplarity explains why my interlocutors were reluctant to point out any favorite potato, a naive question that I raised many times after starting my research into potato valuation in Cuzco. A virtuous grower simply does not have one such favorite and does not cherish just one variety at the expense of another, as the expert potato grower Lino Mamani intimated when he replied, “I cannot choose one favorite. I must love them all.” This ethical and affective positioning provides the impetus for him to continue cultivating a large cornucopia independently of his own preferences. Crucially, Lino Mamani’s quote indicates that appreciation of the potato is not exhausted in the instrumental assets mentioned above. Beside the material qualities related to cultivators’ expectations of eating, potato uyway entails affective and relational considerations. These, as Zimmerer finely documents, involve a “shared sense of the good and the beautiful.”80 Extending a regime of appreciation of the potato beyond the realm of economic maximization turns agriculture into an ethically valued practice for the weaving of ayllu ecologies in which manifold potatoes offer fragile and situated propositions for highland worlding.
Partial Examples and the Art of “Making” Attention to Vegetal Virtues
The stories in this article feature the potato as an ambiguous character. As an embodied realization of values, the potato encapsulates prosperity and misery, strength and vulnerability, the flourishing of life and deadly devastation. An exploration of the glorification and destitution of tuberous beings teases out the political entailment of vegetal heroism and villainy. As the stars of agricultural modernization programs, supposedly “improved varieties” are now villainized by agro-biodiversity conservationists. Historically vilified as an index of Indigenous wretchedness, native potatoes are now appraised by international institutions as gene pools for breeding food-security heroes. Celebrated by breeding laboratories as allies in the war against poverty, genetically modified tubers are repudiated by peasants, activists, and other participants in the GMO event. In these binary regimes of appreciation, one person’s hero is another person’s villain.81 Whether we aspire to a cosmos hospitable only to hyperproductive plants suited for industrial plantations, or to an ecologically sensitive array of beings, inflects who we deem to be a vegetal hero or villain.82 Struggles for the advent of vegetal heroism are thus also a political campaign for worlds to come.
Seeds, indeed, always come with their world: some carry worlds of disarticulation and dispossession; others foster symbiosis to reclaim the commons.83 The worlds potato activists are working to bring forth are composed of all kinds of beings, not just the most resistant. In fact, the very search for heroism pertains to the particular worlds of vegetal exceptionalism epitomized by the agro-industrial quest for universal star crops, such as the miracle grains of the green revolution. Ranked according to their yield by tons per hectare, these vegetal heroes emerge from regimes of monovaluation. For highland cultivators in the cradle of domestication, omnipotence exists only in mythical stories that feature the potato as a generic boon. Historical records also document vegetal elitism in imperial Incan fields along with commercial ventures in colonial and postcolonial times. Yet in the ordinary fields intended for self-consumption, myriad vegetal virtues are embodied by tens of different varieties. These varieties are all good. Hence the manifold and fragile potential qualities of the tubers offer a virtuous orientation—one that is grounded not in the moral perfection of rituals, but rather in the day-to-day encounters of an agricultural livelihood.84
In contrast to the absolutism of the hero, the potato virtuosity distributed across a diverse cornucopia of tubers is fragmented. This is what I mean to highlight by introducing the notion of partial exemplarity. This exemplarity is also partial in the sense that perceptions of worth or weakness stem from “situated knowledge,” emerging from a particular ecology where altitude, the gradient of the slope, the surrounding animals, vegetation and pests, the lunar calendar, and light reflection all matter.85 Humphrey identified evanescence as a feature of Mongol exemplars who “are unique to their subject”; they emerge from a singular relation between a “specialized subject” and the exemplars chosen to develop or extend these very qualities.86 In the mosaic territories of Andean collectives, careful cultivation of an array of varieties likewise brings out the relations of virtuous self-crafting to both tubers and humans. The ability to tend to an array of subtly specialized tubers in the challenging conditions of the highlands creates strong growers as well as strong potatoes. Still, these tuber companions are not invincible; they can always perish. The resaltantes growing rarely in today’s fields bring about the “potential instability” of examples—and with it, they open up a path for creativity and reclaiming of severed relations.87 Partial examples emerge in subjectively engaged tinkering, whereby the association of heterogeneous beings creates possibilities of symbiosis and flourishing in always-uncertain milieux.
From this standpoint, we can appreciate that partial exemplars never preexist the ecological relations from which they emerge. They furtively come to be in what Karen Barad famously coined an “intra-action,” namely, an ontological entanglement from which entities emerge, in contrast to interactions relating preexisting partners.88 Here too, partial exemplarity departs from the purported perfection and objectivity of vegetal heroes. Designed to proliferate in the face of any ecological threat, GMO potatoes are intended as a supercrop precisely because their flourishing is severed from vulnerability to the ecological relations in which life unfolds. When intended as an incarnation of unconditional prosperity, vegetal heroes are displayed as the most accomplished ideals “made socially available.”89 The exemplarity of a potato in the wayk’u family requires the keen gaze of an attuned partner. Despite my enduring interest and affection, I am still unable to capture the textures of native potato virtuosity with acuity. The ability to notice fragmented exemplarity in situated encounters demands meticulous dedication and continuous curiosity. Examples are indeed composed from details and, as Brian Massumi warned us, “every little one matters”; without pondered consideration of details, the example dissolves into generalizations or particularities.90
If heroes are thriving in the Anthropocene, it may be at the expense of the minutiae of partial examples, whose appreciation requires an art for noticing that, as Stengers observed, we have largely forgotten. She reclaims this art to resist forthcoming barbarism: “It is a matter of learning and cultivating attention, this means to literally make attention.”91 She therefore invites us to resist the facility of judgment and simplifications that would once again ratify the tales of progress.92 In the same vein, this article extends an invitation to remain suspicious of blatant vegetal heroism and to develop an attentiveness to fragile examples instead, in order to sustain livability in precarious and heterogeneous worlds.93
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the guest editors of this special section, Viola Schreer and Liana Chua, whose inspiring proposal drew my attention to tuberous heroes. The participants of the Heroes and Villains in the Anthropocene seminar, Helen Curry, Catherine Fallon, David Nally, Owen McNamara, François Thoreau, as well as two anonymous reviewers offered precious comments at different stages of my writing. I extend heartfelt thanks to them for their generous insights. I am immensely grateful to my collaborators, friends, and kin in Cuzco for their patience and affection in sharing their agricultural expertise. This article is the outcome of an investigation that received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 950220) and from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique project (grant agreement no. 35282336)
Notes
Bruneel, Cottyn, and Beeckaert, “Potato Late Blight”; Salaman, Potato Varieties, 8; Reader, Potato, 14, 121; Earle, Feeding the People; Messer, “Potatoes (White),” 193; Pollan, Botany of Desire, 202, quoting Arthur Young; Nally and Kearns, “Vegetative States,” 1384, quoting William Cobbett.
See also Bodart and Van Dyck, Des patates; Nally and Kearns, “Vegetative States”; and Pollan, Botany of Desire.
This is an expression used by Karl Zimmerer, who pioneered the study of the Andean tuber’s manifold appreciation.
I use “potato collective” with a Latourian concern to highlight “a project of assembling new entities not yet gathered together” (Latour, Reassembling the Social, 75). In this light, heroism is positioned within unstable associations between humans and an array of other beings (including soil, pests, genes, and chemicals) with whom tubers are significant partners in the composition of collectives with no delimited territory.
Le Guin, Carrier Bag Theory, 28; see also Swanson et al., “Bodies Tumbled into Bodies,” M8; Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, xxii.
Earle, Feeding the People, 128; Murra, La organización económica, 38; Salaman, History and Social Influence, 102.
Earle, Feeding the People, 25; Pollan, Botany of Desire, 199; Salaman, History and Social Influence, 109.
Nally and Kearns, “Vegetative States,” 1377, 1382; see also Salaman, History and Social Influence, 215–23.
Bruneel, Cottyn, and Beeckaert, “Potato Late Blight,” 7; Nally and Kearns, “Vegetative States,” 1383.
Earle, Feeding the People, 104. See also McNeill, “How the Potato Changed the World’s History,” 79; Reader, Potato, 117.
Earle, Feeding the People, 14; Nally and Kearns, “Vegetative States,” 1384, quoting William Cobbett.
David Nally, pers. comm., 2023; Nally, Human Encumbrances; see also Earle, Feeding the People, 155.
Genebank, “Cultivated Potato Germplasm Collection,” https://cipotato.org/genebankcip/potato-cultivated/ (accessed March 30, 2023).
Patatiste is a contraction of the French words for potato and activist.
Bodart and Van Dyck, Des patates, 3 (my translation). Patatistes do not search for heroic praise; they benefited from the anonymity of the mass when about one hundred of them self-proclaimed to be the guilty party in support of the eleven who had been arrested.
Crops’ temporality and territorial occupation are other qualities from which the authors draw inspiration (Bodart and Van Dyck, Des patates, 29, 34).
International Potato Center, “United Nations Declares International Day of the Potato,” CIP (website), https://cipotato.org/inthenews/united-nations-declares-international-day-of-the-potato-emphasizing-its-role-in-combating-hunger/ (accessed March 13, 2024).
Laboratory breeds are not adapted for the highest-elevation plots, which are mostly devoted to the cultivation of native varieties.
This concern is now assumed to be overstated in the sense that most growers continued to sow small plots of native varieties for domestic consumption (Brush, Farmers’ Bounty; Zimmerer, Changing Fortunes).
On agrobiodiversity and the maintenance of reciprocal transspecies relations, see Zimmerer, Changing Fortunes, 183.
Zimmerer also stresses the importance of agriculture and diet in the achievement of sumaq kawsay, which he aptly translates as “fit livelihood ethic,” although I see sumaq kawsay as an intersubjective entanglement and ecological commitment more than a “resource ethic” (Changing Fortunes, 187).
The reciprocal character of uyway relations intimates that the potato would also be prone to operate ethical work on its own ánimu. The fact that potatoes are expected to take on ethical positions in agricultural relations supports this proposition (see also Zimmerer, Changing Fortunes, 193), although I can’t develop it further in the frame of this essay.
In her study of marginal agriculture in the Philippines, Virginia Nazarea highlights the “fuzziness” of sweet potato evaluation, meaning that an estimated asset for one culinary purpose can become a disadvantage if another preparation was fancied (Cultural Memory and Biodiversity, 67). The regime of appreciation in the marginal plots of Pisac is fuzzy in Nazarea’s sense, as the evaluation of a potato’s qualities shifts according to the foreseen mode of consumption.
On “celebration and condemnation” of hybrids as signifiers of political economies, see Curry, “Hybrid Seeds.”
See also Bodart and Van Dyck, Des patates.
See also Strathern, Relations, 17; and de la Cadena, Earth Beings, 103.
Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes, 52, my translation; on the art of noticing, see Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World.
