Finger(s)-Millet-Fieldwork-Photo: : Scholarly Experiments Using “Plant Thinking”

Abstract

Inspired by the textual performativity in Sara Ahmed’s (2019) What’s the Use? and women farmers’ “use” of finger millet as crop and grain, this paper experiments with “using” photographs taken in fields and homes in Uttarakhand, India. As method, I practice forms of what Michael Marder calls “non-conscious intentionality,” which embodies (more-than-) vegetal animacy and intelligence. This entails emulating forms of animacy, spatial extension, openness, reciprocity, and rhizomatic growth often dissuaded in scholarly writing. How might I interact with images of (more-than-) finger millet as fellow collaborators and continue a process of learning I experienced “in the field”? Can using finger millet as digital image dislocate cognitive ruts and unstick ways of thinking whose intransigence reproduces the temporal, spatial, intellectual, interpersonal, and personal disjuncture between “field” and “page”? My intention is not to disavow the ways power circulates through me but to disrupt my scholarly habits and taken for granted ideas.