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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
During the 20th century, agriculture in the United States underwent a radical shift, away from family farms and toward vast agribusiness empires--resulting in more food but less plant diversity. Virginia Nazarea’s dream is to reunite seeds with the cultural legacies around them and in the process help preserve important plant genetic material.
“My students and I are exploring marginality, memory and resistance in relation to persistence and loss of crop diversity,” says Nazarea, an associate professor of anthropology. “Marginal spaces, like women’s home gardens, are places where plant diversity thrives. Many members of the so-called ‘cultural minorities’ and people in less-developed areas retain a strong sense of place that means an intimate knowledge of crops, their cultivation and their uses.”
Saving seeds is nothing new, of course. In many centers of origin and diversity, germplasm banks preserve seed stock under conditions that keep it from deteriorating.
Nazarea’s idea, however, is to save not only seeds but the stories of their use, often passed down for generations. Together, these memories form a living history that tells a considerable amount about who we are.
The idea, called “memory banking,” led to the formation of the Southern Seed Legacy Project, which has for several years combined the collecting of seed varieties with documentation and archiving of the stories of people who have shared the seeds over decades of use.
Nazarea knew already that some people have used the same seed stocks for decades and that the seeds are related to culture by more than soil and water. Does seed-saving relate only to yield and resistance to diseases and pests, or are there cultural reasons why some have survived for years?
The only way to find out was to ask seed-savers themselves. The results of that simple idea have been far-reaching. Nazarea has begun categorizing the information she has gathered by class, gender and ethnicity, constructing the first-ever database of how Southerners have used and conserved seeds during the past century.
Nazarea’s work doesn’t only take place in the American South, however. She developed the memory-banking concept and methodology when she was working with sweet potato farmers in Bukidnon, Philippines, and retains a strong interest in southeast Asia. She also has an active and growing ethnoecology project in Ecuador concerning how land use is changing and why.
The use of so-called “old-time” or “legacy” seeds is limited in large-scale agriculture, because farmers may not be able to obtain crop insurance and input subsidies unless they use certain varieties of modern seeds. But farmers at the margins of large-scale cropping have retained older seed stocks because, says Nazarea, the seeds give meaning and identity to their work and their lives.
Nazarea’s project, however, is the only one in the South that is combining the seeds with the stories of those who have preserved them.
“I have found that seed-savers always have a keen native intelligence, unbounded curiosity and a high degree of personal sovereignty,” says Nazarea. “Their memories and stories are very important to all of us.”
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