Stalking Wild Maize: Taxonomy, Plant Exploration, and the Search for Corn's Origins in South America

In the twentieth century, plant explorers in many countries were enlisted in the assembly of seed and plant collections that brought together hundreds and sometimes thousands of varieties of the same crop species. These collections were, and are, understood chiefly as the foundations for effective plant breeding. However, like other biological collections, crop seed collections were also essential tools of taxonomy: their study was both conditioned by and productive of evolutionary narratives about plant cultures and human natures. This crop taxonomic enterprise has been subject to far less scrutiny than its agronomic counterpart. In this article, I redress that imbalance through an account of a search for Zea mays (maize or corn) and its wild relatives in South America in the 1940s. As I show, developing taxonomies of cultivated plant species, and especially accounting for distinct local forms of these crop plants, was a profoundly interdisciplinary enterprise. It was also a project conditioned by researchers' expectations of the places, peoples, and plants they would encounter. The taxonomy of maize, like other taxonomic enterprises, emerged as a mirror of those who taxonomized.