MonoCulture with a Capital C: Date Palms and the Roots of Modern Monoculture

• In Event: Ecological Imaginaries and the Making of Trans-regional Landscapes

Abstract

The date palm (phoenix dactylifera) is a fruit tree endemic to the Middle East. Cultivators around the region grew it as a part of complex polyculture systems since its domestication some fifty thousand years ago. Then, by the late nineteenth century, date cultivators adopted monoculture – cultivating one crop in a given area – prioritizing date palm production for exports over existing subsistence practices. At roughly the same time, American state officials laid the foundation for the future American date sector in the Southwest by importing date palm offshoots from the Middle East and conducting field and lab experiments with the new crop. American date boosters never considered polyculture practices in date palm cultivation but instead framed monoculture as central to their future visions of agriculture, economy, and settlement.
My presentation examines the rise of these similar-yet-different date monoculture spaces. Rather than seeing monocultural landscapes as places whose ecologies were “radically simplified” to maximize agricultural extraction, I argue that we should consider the cultural, social, and economic simplifications that enabled such ecological transformation. Doing that requires reckoning with the growing complexities of agricultural practices at the end of the nineteenth century and the political changes that fostered plant and knowledge circulation. Thus, I suggest replacing “monoculture” with MonoCulture – a broader category that underlines the various cultural and ecological vectors that shape the final simplified landscape.

Author

• Atar David, the University of Texas at Austin