The University of Arizona Press
May 13, 2024
The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast interviewed Mike Anastario, co-author of Kneeling Before Corn: Recuperating More-than-Human Intimacies on the Salvadoran Milpa. The book’s co-authors are Elena Salamanca and Elizabeth Hawkins. Anastario talks about their ethnographic research with corn farmers in El Salvador and how this evolved from focusing on the relationship between plants and people, to the impact of agrichemicals on the environment and human health. Listen to the podcast on Environmental Health News.
About the book:
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.
