Helen Anne Curry (University of Cambridge) - In the 1930s, the plant biologist Edgar Anderson set out on an enormous research initiative. He was fed up with taxonomists' failure to devise methods appropriate for mapping the relationships of humans' companion plant species—that is, weeds and crops. In fact, he was fed up with their dismissal of these entities as even worthy of study in the first place. So he devised a research program that he believed would demonstrate clearly the usefulness of devising taxonomies for plant domesticates based on their evolutionary history. He would study and classify Zea mays, also known as maize or corn, the most important crop in the United States, a task he believed could have significant dividends for US corn production. At the time, the immense diversity of corn was only just beginning to be charted. American and European plant hunters were regularly identifying novel (to them) locally adapted varieties, today called "landraces" but described by Anderson and his peers as "primitive races" or "indigenous strains." To corral this barrage of biological specimens into a defendable taxonomic ordering, Anderson looked to earlier efforts made to classify humans into races. These provided a model for how to divide a freely interbreeding species into subpopulations using variations in specific phenotypic characteristics. Therefore, although "race" was a term long available to plant and animal breeders for discussing distinct breeds of domesticated plants and especially animals, the system of "racial classification" devised by Anderson was informed by ideas about how to carve up human groups. What's more, when applied beyond Anderson's own research program, the racial classification system for corn began to look like a method of classifying the indigenous peoples who grew these corns much as a botanical taxonomy. This paper explores the history of early efforts to devise an evolutionary history and contemporary taxonomy of corn landraces, looking in particular at Anderson's research program and its later application by scientists in the United States and Mexico. In the process it also explores ideas about human biological and cultural diversity. Although superficially absent from this taxonomic system as it developed, such ideas informed its assumptions at every turn and also confused efforts to apply it in practice. For example, the racial taxonomy of Mexican landraces celebrated the evolutionary history and especially the racial hybridization of corn in terms almost identical to those used in celebrating the historical mixing, mestizaje, of peoples that created modern Mexico. Similarly, the search for "primitive" and "indigenous" corn inevitably led collectors to "primitive" and "indigenous" peoples, and to disappointment and dismissal wherever these people were discovered to have "modernized" by adopting commercial corn varieties. In exploring such issues, the paper brings together the well-developed histories of human racial classification and botanical exploration and classification to develop a fuller account of the unique scientific and political complexities involved in charting crop diversity.
