Vegetal intimacies in science

Abstract

This paper examines relationships between Ugandan scientists and their experimental banana plants. Their transnational research project aims at introducing nutritionally improved bananas to Uganda, where over centuries the banana has written itself into everyday life, language, landscape and climate. The paper considers how the rhythms of the banana itself and the conventions of scientific handling shape forms of intimacy. In the context of biological research, where rapidly growing plants mean quick publications, scientists experience the banana’s slow pace as frustrating. While the banana’s temporality forces scientists to slow track their careers, biologists’ quotidian tasks consist of handling what they call ‘plant babies’ in the greenhouse, where vocabularies of love, nurturance and childcare abound. By examining the plant-scientist relationships, the paper proposes seeing intimacy as an embodied history. Unlike human-centred histories of great events and great men, foregrounding intimacy with plants draws attention to muted histories that perhaps have never been made explicit but still are sensed and felt, congealing in experience and quotidian practice. Thinking with such embodied histories allows appreciating unorthodox forms of expertise expressed in contemporary scientific practice and highlights their potential for reimagining convivial futures.

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