Field

Although the meaning of the word “field” is seemingly straightforward, it commands forty-nine different entries in the OED and exerts a magnetic attraction for other words, as we see in the compound form whose entries continue to proliferate: a fieldmouse, a battlefield, a fieldworker, a quantum field, a digital field, to mention just a few. Despite the breadth of possible associations, a semantic kernel anchors all these connections; the sense of a clearing can be generalized—“a piece of ground,” “open country,” “a space,” “a place,” “an area.”^[1]And yet this loose definition that works across myriad sites, acknowledging a space of relative openness, also evokes containment: “an enclosed or marked out area.” We should not be surprised by this description’s oppositional resonance between what is unrestricted and what is confined, because a certain recalcitrance on the part of any word or object to submit to containment lines attends all attempts to define or fix identity^.[2] Indeed, the meaning of “field” is exemplary of such play and vacillation, as it must refer “outside itself” (to circumscription and borders) to identify its specific “value,” or meaning, as open and unrestricted.

When a field lies fallow, we again see this enfolding of opposites in the way we perceive it. Its specific value, for example, refers to a practice no longer in evidence: It was cultivated by humans and probably will be again. However, according to the Germanic ancestries of the word “field” and its ongoing usage, “open land” need not reflect human endeavor: It can be a comparative descriptor of a landscape that is “unencumbered by obstruction, as contrasted with forest, hill, or marsh.” We might think the difference easily decided, and yet the determination that a field is either “made” (a cultural product) or is already present in nature has become so politically fraught that ambiguity can even destabilize what it means to be human. The association of culture with cultivation and agriculture, originally Latin colere, “to cultivate,” explains the tendency to understand “field” in terms of farming, a specifically human activity that marks an ability to intentionally change nature. However, this tautology that conflates being human with the capacity to farm and cultivate is rendered exceptional, indeed, species defining, when the word “intentional” is given explanatory weight. Consequently, to suggest that nature’s actors also produce fields through cultivation can provoke significant anxiety.^[3]

The intense interest that followed Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture^[4] is testament to the political heat that the term “field,” with its tacit link with cultivation, can generate. To the argument whose research from early settler diaries suggests that First Nations people were farmers before colonization—planting and harvesting grasses, distributing seeds, and turning the natural landscape into meadows and fields—the response was swift. As background, Indigenous Australians have historically been recognized as “‘mere’ hunter-gatherers,”^[5]wandering nomads whose purportedly bleak survival, a “hapless opportunism,”^[6]came to justify dispossession in the absence of land ownership.^[7] Against this, Pascoe’s claim that an itinerant lifestyle was supplemented by farming activities has been criticized as an unscholarly progress narrative, an attempt to “save the native” with evidence of their unacknowledged sophistication.

In Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate, Keryn A. Walshe and Peter Sutton^[8] forensically contest Pascoe’s departure point, asking why the complexity of hunter-gatherer activities, a form of land management, is judged less advanced than traditional European farming techniques.^[9] And yet despite their emphasis on the comparative sophistication of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, Walshe and Sutton remain insistent that Indigenous activities should not be confused with farming. We learn, for example, that the addition of “-cultivators” to the description “hunter-gatherer,” an argument to which Pascoe refers positively, was later revised as misguided by Ian Keen, the anthropologist who first used the term. For Walshe and Sutton, Keen’s correction is pivotal in determining that cultivation did not occur, a conclusion buttressed by Keen’s omission of “garden(ing), sowing, planting or, indeed, cultivation” in the index.^[10]We also learn that “the use of fire to modify the environment” was not accompanied by “evidence of soil preparation,”^[11]which for Walshe and Sutton proves that cultivation was not the intention. However, we need to pause here to interrogate the assumptions that drive such conclusions. Importantly, Walshe and Sutton concede that the land was fired to create meadows and more manageable open spaces, spaces that would change the vegetation to encourage small mammals into the area as well as promote the growth of certain vegetable species for food gathering. They also note that “some Aboriginal people harvested seeds, ground them and often baked the resulting loaves.”^[12]Given this, why assume that the soil wasn’t prepared for cultivation, when firing does precisely that? Why insist that the practice of plant husbandry in uncleared land, which is largely acknowledged, could not be an especially astute mode of cultivation? Indeed, in anticipation of this argument’s direction, what do we forfeit if we accept that plant husbandry and cultivation, which include the making of fields, can be practiced by Indigenous peoples as well as animals and even plants themselves?^[13] For Walshe and Sutton, such “stretched definitions and uses of qualifiers such as semi-(cultivation) and proto-(agriculture)” describe “Eurocentric wishful thinking,”^[14]an attempt to inflate Indigenous achievement. But couldn’t the same be said if we restrict what defines cultivation to rigid entries in a book index of recognized European terms? The conservative nature of such tautological arguments makes it difficult to consider that perhaps different modes of Indigenous land use can also be considered different modes of cultivation and farming.

For Walshe and Sutton, a field is cultivated land, and cultivated land is a product of human settlement: Nomadism, by definition, is incapable of making fields. And yet their neologism, “hunter-gatherers-plus,” registers that “something” has exceeded conventional understandings of Indigenous practices, an extra complexity that warrants acknowledgment. But what is this “something more”? A significant body of anthropological literature describes Indigenous Australians as “fire-stick farmers,” burning the land to produce open clearings for easier access and use. However, why such behaviors are deemed modifications rather than changes, especially as the effect of such “modifications” can radically transform the behaviors of vegetal and animal populations, seems spurious. Are we to assume that Aboriginal activities, by dint of being Aboriginal, can only modify the landscape in ways that don’t change it? If we return to the definition of “field,” we see a political struggle over how to draw boundaries and resolve ambiguity. An underlying logic informs these decisions: Cultural activity is agential, transformative, and presumably human—it changes nature—whereas for a comparatively passive nature, change can only be accidental rather than intended, a comparatively modest affair. Consequently, when Indigenous life is so readily conceived as an extension of natural, harmonious rhythms that can have no disruptive results, the concept of “field,” with its correlate “cultivation,” consolidates a very particular version of human exceptionalism based on a radical and alienating break from nature. It follows that the Indigenous are incapable of realizing such a breach.

In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis,^[15]Amitav Ghosh finds solace in the Native American belief that “landscapes are alive.”^[16]Further, he emphasizes the ecological reach and planetary impact that “terraforming” exerts on the weather, a description we can surely reverse, or even entangle, to better underline the impact of his point. However, as Ghosh takes special umbrage against the colonialist tendency to create a landscape of “Neo-Europes”—fields, plantations—whose terraforming effects have been especially destructive, the Native American provocation that perhaps terraforming exemplifies the liveliness of landscapes, their inherent and adaptive agency, is simply abandoned. While Ghosh’s overall criticisms of the impact of colonialism are not in dispute, we need to ask why the shape of his argument mirrors that of Sutton and Walshe: In short, there are “mere modifications” that effect little to no significant change, and then there are changes of an entirely different order. Ghosh underlines that colonialists wreaked havoc “upon the flora, fauna, demography, and terrain of Australia and the Americas (and also of islands like the Canaries and New Zealand).”^[17]However, his commitment to the manifest destruction of this transformative “golden spike,” which renders “European” synonymous with radical change and destruction, requires him to remain silent about the devastating impact of Māori arrival in Aotearoa^[18] or the significant transformation of the Australian landscape wrought by First Nations peoples. If European colonization is not the starting point of significant terraforming activity, then where should we begin, and what reasons justify our choice?

We can shake things up by considering Charles Darwin’s last manuscript, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations of Their Habits.^[19] In a lifelong fascination with earthworms that granted them intelligence, Darwin observed their dietary preferences, noting that “judging by their eagerness for certain kinds of food, they must enjoy the pleasures of eating.”^[20]Put simply, worms help to make soil—indeed, fields—perhaps happily, and their terraforming capacities are poorly understood as modification: “In one pasture study, earthworms consumed between 20 and 40 tons of soil per acre per year.”^[21]Planetary impact, indeed!

What emerges from these debates is a nature/culture division whose political and ethical consequences invest human exceptionalism/anthropocentrism with the inaugurating power of planetary dispossession.^[22] Although we often read confessions about the damaging effects and failures of the West’s sovereign responsibility, a degree of skepticism seems appropriate when the political consequence of this mea culpa is to reinforce the very power that the apology is meant to qualify.^[23] With this in mind, can the field of plant studies complicate an anthropocentrism that understands nonhuman differences in terms of absent or diminished capacity, for example, modification rather than change, chance effects rather than intended outcomes—in sum, an Edenic, almost mindless existence before The Fall into calculation, violence, and corruption? Two questions arise. Is it possible to comprehend a vegetal specificity that might prove utterly alien because outside normative patterns of human understanding? Putting the question this way tends to reassure us that the divide between us and them, between nature and culture, between political smarts and those more automatic adaptations of life will remain intact. More provocatively, then, if the notion of radical difference, the incommensurability that the alien purportedly conjures proves uncannily familiar, rendering us, the inquiring subject, as fascinatingly foreign as the plant, then ecological entanglement becomes more than an addition of differences. When we allow a more critical interrogation of our terms of reference, it becomes increasingly apparent that religious tropes of good or evil that rest on faith effectively sanitize and deny the ethical and political complexities involved.

We have seen that the definitional requirement for a field to be self-contained is always maintained in the breach. Even the relatively recent field of plant studies, which assumes a recognizable coherence, attests to an internal incoherence that makes its identifying boundary lines difficult to locate. Do botany, language studies, soil sciences, philosophy, archaeology, literature, climate science, history, chemistry, and art history, to name just a few of the disciplinary perspectives in attendance, share a common object of study? And if we concede that their respective “objects” are ephemeral to some degree because transitional and mutating within and across research areas, then what does the notion of “field” hope to ensure, given the cacophony of translative processes that produce it?

An analytical reliance on the nature/culture division positions nature, or the nonhuman, in ways that refuse certain behaviors and capacities even when they are in evidence. And yet despite this, the interventionary surprise in plant studies has been the sustained questioning of such prejudices. Anthony Trewavas,^[24]for example, argues that complex systems of perceptive discrimination at the local and whole-plant level, as well as “signal transduction” that generates spatial awareness of the plant’s being and environment, should rightly be described as intelligence. Several prominent plant scientists, including Monica Gagliano,^[25]offer evidence of associative learning and memory in plants, finding that “the sensitive plant,” Mimosa pudica, is capable of both. Gagliano et al.^[26]also broaden our notion of perception by showing that a pea plant can hear the movement of water and respond accordingly, suggesting that a range of frequencies is already primed in the plant to be heard and responded to, as with animal audition.

We could continue to humanize the plant by acknowledging its social engagements across species, its defensive and seemingly affective behaviors, and the forethought in its communicative attentions. But have we overlooked something by adopting a field theory that presumes enclosure, a field whose properties might be extended or retracted to either include or exclude? For example, although gestures of generosity that strive to recognize plant intelligence or underline the complex sociality of plant behavior are both welcome and provocative, the assumption that human intelligence or social arrangements should be the adjudicating marker of what counts as cognitive and organizational smarts might give us pause. Importantly, the problem isn’t the obvious anthropocentrism in this but something more confounding and ultimately more interesting. Charles I. Abramson and Paco Calvo for example, note that the terms “‘behaviour’ and ‘intelligence’ are also fraught with difficulties [. . .] Biologists do not agree on what constitutes behaviour. Levitis et al. (2009) found 25 different definitions of behaviour. Regarding the term ‘intelligence’ there are over 70 distinct definitions.”^[27]In response to such imprecision about one of the most important identifiers of what it means to be human, the authors ask, “How can anyone accurately study and compare the intelligence of animals, ‘brainless systems’ or machines, if one has no consistent definition of what it is?”^[28]

As suggested earlier, the identity of a field always involves muddling the stability and location of its own haecceity and what belongs where. We have seen how nature has an uncanny way of mimicking culture, appearing in the wrong place and consequently obscuring the identity and specific attributes of both. Rather than attempting a correction that might hope to disentangle this confusion, criticizing anthropocentrism as an error and returning nature and culture to their respective places, we can animate the sense of “field” from a noun, a fixity, a “something” circumscribed, to a verb whose processual economy, or “fielding,” exceeds such boundaries. However, even this description doesn’t quite acknowledge the perversity and play of its spatiotemporal expressiveness, a chameleon morphogenesis where “fielding” can also appear as an apparent stasis, a seeming passivity—an identifiable property, indeed, a noun.

As a strategy that might help us engage this mystery and better appreciate why vegetal being can appear strangely human, and further, why this may not be a mistake, I want to take seriously that “there is no outside (of) nature.”^[29] Here we have a field of sorts that on a first look appears originary and contained, prior to the achievements and capacities that human exceptionalism assumes. However, if “firstness” in this instance is strangely human, then perhaps this “originary humanicity” reconfigures “the how” of individuation, the apparent gap between already-circumscribed entities, whether between one field and another, or between human and vegetal being. Kinji Imanishi is helpful here, as he clarifies the relationality that a “field of living” involves.^[30] A field is not just a space around an entity, as we conventionally understand an environment, or context, within which something exists. If for Imanishi the living thing is continuous with its environment, indeed, one might say, an ontological expression of it, then can we effectively circumscribe that field, that environment, from other fields and environments that appear elsewhere and other?


Notes

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[1] All references are from the OED.

[2] This description chimes with a semiological understanding of value, or valeur (signification), which can be compared with an economic field: Whether other words are present or not, they are thought to haunt and make possible a particular word’s significance, or weight, much as we see in the fixing of a share price through the fluctuations of other commodities on the stock exchange. In other words, the difference between one thing and another will always be enfolded, or resonant, with something that appears absent.

[3] Although the ability to change the landscape is conceded to many creatures, the degree of change is usually minimized, or alternatively, any sense of intention attenuated or rendered impossible.

[4] Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture (Magabala Books, 2018). The original title was Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Magabala Books, 2014).

[5] Pascoe, Dark Emu, 183.

[6] Pascoe, Dark Emu, 1.

[7] The image is significantly misleading, as it denies the technological, societal, and spiritual complexities that hunter-gatherer life-worlds realize. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes such societies as “affluent,” or comparatively rich in leisure time: Having solved their economic needs with remarkable efficiency, they could develop complex spiritual cosmologies and cultural practices. In other words, these were not unsophisticated societies. Although this argument’s notion of “affluence” has been criticized, Sahlins’s work provides an excellent departure point for such debates. See his Stone Age Economics (Aldine Atherton, Inc., 1972).
[8] Keryn A. Walshe and Peter Sutton, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate (Melbourne University Press, 2021).
[9] There are many criticisms of Pascoe’s book, often with different targets. The lack of scholarly writing features prominently in these reviews, as does the tendency to cherry-pick evidence and generalize its content by ignoring relevant anthropological literatures that contest his claims.

[10] Walshe and Sutton, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers, 60.

[11] Walshe and Sutton, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers, 60.

[12] Walshe and Sutton, Farmersor Hunter-Gatherers, 85.

[13] In view of this entry’s attempt to question the rigidity of the division between nature and culture, nonhuman and human, I find one of the reviewer’s comments especially suggestive. She notes that what is at stake is “a strata of fields intermingling, because [ . . . ] field practices [are] ongoing, [and] if we accept as you propose animals, plants, and Indigenous peoples in the thinking, then also spatially it can never be a singular, confined field, but the practice of fielding kind of bounces off and intrudes and overlaps with others who also make their fields—complicating location, identity, scale . . .”

[14] Walshe and Sutton, Farmersor Hunter-Gatherers, 87.


[15] Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (The University of Chicago Press, 2021). The book delivers a powerful argument, detailing the violence of settler colonialism in the Banda Islands since the harvesting of nutmeg in the fifteenth century. For Ghosh, the resulting ecological devastation and murderous behaviors towards the Indigenous have a causal link with climate change.

[16] Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, 51.

[17] Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse, 52.

[18] It is surely noteworthy that 40 percent of the native vegetation was destroyed and myriad species were hunted to extinction with the arrival of Māori.

[19] Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations of Their Habits (William Clowes and Sons, Limited, 1881).

[20] Darwin, Vegetable Mould, 34.

[21] Sjoerd Duiker and Richard Stehouwer, Earthworms (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 4.

[22] The Indigenous are consistently removed from this narrative. Still “in Nature,” they tend to become placeholders for something benign that precedes technological exploitation and calculation, something that has yet to be alienated from its origins.

[23] In a different but not unrelated context, Jacques Derrida interprets the confessional mea culpa of Claude Lévi-Strauss as he laments his guilt in bringing progress (harm) to the Nambikwara of the Amazon as “an ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism, an ethnocentrism in the consciousness of a liberating progressivism.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 120.

[24] Anthony Trewavas, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” Annals of Botany 92, no. 1 (July 2003): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcg101.

[25] Monica Gagliano et al., “Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters,” Oecologia 175 (2014): 63–72.

[26] Monica Gagliano et al., “Tuned In: Plant Roots Use Sound to Locate Water,” Oecologia 184 (2017): 151–60.

[27] Charles I. Abramson and Paco Calvo, “Unresolved Issues of Behavioural Analysis in Invertebrates,” Animal Sentience: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling 32, no. 18 (2022): 3, https://doi.org/10.51291/2377–7478.1739.

[28] Abramson and Calvo, “Unresolved Issues,” 3.

[29] The expression reworks Derrida’s “no outside (of) text” to make the point that “textuality” is not a synonym for culture or human representational endeavor. Rather, “no outside” implies that what we assume is prior to, or outside, culture is already textual because entangled. See my Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke University Press, 2011).

[30] Kinji Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things (Japan Anthropology Workshop Series), ed. Pamela J. Asquith, trans. Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi, and Hiroyuki Takasaki (Routledge, 2002), 60.