1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [226]
After an hour or two, the pilot hurried us back to Bulalacao. He was worried about taking a boat with no lights, charts, or navigation equipment around the rocky, island-dappled coast at night. I walked along the town esplanade with Rudmar, looking for a place to buy some water. Afternoon light was beginning to throw deep shadows. I came upon some women and children in what looked, to my inexpert eye, like a family garden around a palm-thatched home—a bahay kubo.
The women and children moved with enviable efficiency—they were getting things done. Towering above their heads were tall stalks of maize, now the second most important crop in the Philippines. Below it were squashes and peppers. I could see why the botanists had been amused by the song—the plants they were growing would not have been out of place in Mexico. Yet at the same time the garden was obviously something else.
Gardeners work in partnership, more or less successfully, with what nature provides. They experiment all the time, fiddling with this, trying out that. People take seeds and stick them in the ground to see what happens—that’s how Ifugao villagers bred hundreds of types of rice in a few centuries. An essential factor is that gardeners experience the consequences of their own actions. They make decisions and expend labor; a few months later they discover what they have wrought. Externalities are rare. Gardens are places of constant change, but the changes are owned by the gardener—which is why they feel like home.
Despite the visible impatience of the pilot, I spent a few minutes watching the family in their garden. In this place the Columbian Exchange had been adapted and remade. Families had embraced the biological assaults of the outside world—some of them, anyway—and made them into something of their own. Other problems would be dealt with as they came. Even people trying to preserve the past by growing traditional varieties of rice are necessarily facing the future. The women were weeding around the maize. Every stalk carried its American past in its DNA, but the kernels swelling in the cobs were concerned with next season’s growth.
APPENDIX A
Fighting Words
A book like this must thread a path through terminological quicksand. The problems are threefold. First, many of the names that readers are familiar with are inaccurate; sometimes they are viewed as insulting. Second, different people perceive things in different ways, so a term that may be spot-on from one point of view may seem wildly off target from another. Third, words can be used in different ways in past than present, so that one can employ a term accurately (that is, use it in the way it was used by the people under discussion at the time and place under discussion) but convey entirely the wrong thing.
Take the word “Asian.” In countries like the United States, the term is a replacement for “Oriental,” which is viewed as Eurocentric. In other parts of the world, though, “Oriental” and its translated equivalents seem unexceptionable. Because “Asian” is a common word in all places, substitution should be unproblematic, at least at first glance—what’s the cost? The cost is that although the dictionary defines “Asian” as meaning “of, relating to, or characteristic of the continent of Asia”—the entire landmass, from Israel