Research Catalog

Title

Heirloom seeds and their keepers : marginality and memory in the conservation of biological diversity / Virginia D. Nazarea.

Author

Nazarea, Virginia D. (Virginia Dimasuay), 1954-

Publication

Tucson : University of Arizona Press, c2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 193 p. : ill., maps; 24 cm.

Summary

• "As scientists grapple with the erosion of the genetic diversity of crops and their wild relatives, old-fashioned farmers and gardeners continue to save, propagate, and pass on folk varieties and heirloom seeds. Virginia Nazarea focuses on the role of these seedsavers in the perpetuation of diversity. She thoughtfully examines the framework of scientific conservation and argues for the merits of everyday conservation - one that is beyond programmatic design. Whether considering small-scale rice and sweet potato farmers in the Philippines or participants in the Southern Seed Legacy and Introduced Germplasm from Vietnam in the American South, she explores roads not necessarily less traveled but certainly less recognized in the conservation of biodiversity."
• "Farmers and gardeners have long appreciated a wide variety of plants and have nurtured them for meals, medicine, and exchange. But diversity too often has been surrendered to monocultures of fields and spirits, predisposing much of modern agriculture to uniformity and, consequently, vulnerability. Today it is primarily at the individual level - such as growing and saving a strange old bean variety or a curious-looking gourd - that any lasting conservation actually takes place."
• "Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers offers a much-needed, scientifically researched perspective on the contribution of seedsaving that illustrates its critical significance to the preservation of both cultural knowledge and crop diversity around the world. It opens new conversations between anthropology and biology, and between researchers and practitioners, as it honors conservation as a way of life."--Jacket.
• "Through characters and stories that offer a wealth of insights about human nature and society, Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers helps readers more fully understand why biodiversity persists when there are so many pressures for it not to. The key, Nazarea explains, is in the sovereign spaces seedsavers inhabit and create, where memories counter a culture of forgetting and abandonment engendered by modernity. A book about theory as much as practice, it profiles these individuals who march to their own beat in a world where diversity is increasingly devalued as the predictability of mass production becomes the norm."

Subject

• Agrobiodiversity conservation
• Germplasm resources, Plant > Collection and preservation
• Seeds
• Traditional farming

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [171]-183) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

It takes a village clown -- A tale of two metaphors : jumping genes and colporteurs -- Ordinary/extraordinary lives -- Southern memories in a globalizing world -- Out-of-place sense of place -- Stories and histories -- Conservation without design, or, The anthropology of quirkiness.

ISBN

• 0816524351 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 9780816524358 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2004026290

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library