ABOUT THIS BOOK

The cultivation of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) on subsistence farms in El Salvador is a multispecies, world-making, and ongoing process. Milpa describes a small subsistence corn farm. It is derived from the word milli (‘field’, or a piece of land under active cultivation) in Nahuatl. The milpa is a farming practice that uses perennial, intercropping, and swidden (fire and fallow) techniques that predates the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

Kneeling Before Corn focuses on the intimate relations that develop between plants and humans in the milpas of the northern rural region of El Salvador. It explores the ways in which more-than-human intimacies travel away from and return to the milpa through human networks.

Collective and multivocal, this work reflects independent lines of investigation and multiple conversations between co-authors—all of whom have lived in El Salvador for extended periods of time. Throughout the six chapters, the co-authors invite readers to consider more-than-human intimacies by rethinking, experimenting with, and developing new ways of documenting, analyzing, and knowing the intimacies that form between humans and the plants that they cultivate, conserve, long for, and eat. This book offers an innovative account of rural El Salvador in the twenty-first century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mike Anastario is an assistant professor of health sciences at Northern Arizona University and the author of Parcels: Memories of Salvadoran Migration.

Elena Salamanca is a Salvadoran writer and historian currently pursuing a PhD in history at El Colegio de México. She is author of Tal Vez Monstruos, Landsmoder, and Siempre Vivas.

Elizabeth Hawkins is a San Salvador–based attorney and writer with a background in representing immigrants and asylum seekers.

REVIEWS

“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

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“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

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TABLE OF CONTENTS