Guest Lecture by Jiajing Wang

May 6, 2025

Domesticating Plants or Domesticating ourselves? A Posthumanist approach to the Origins of Rice Farming in Southern China

Challenging traditional explanations that attribute the rise of agriculture solely to human interventions on the environment, this lecture explores how the active agencies exercised by plants and tools have “domesticated” humans. As a result, humans became dependent on tools and were trapped in a sedentary lifestyle, thereby foreshadowing the rise of rice agriculture.