A critical history of the taxonomy of the genus Agave
Maguey or Agave is a genus of plants well distinguished in the lands of Anáhuac, and now in many places in the world thanks to mezcal. Since prehistoric times, people have used it for different purposes. This has resulted in this plant being recognized and, therefore, categorized by different social groups. Without a doubt, a characteristic that runs through humanity is the fact of classifying. The anthropologists Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven have written: “Surely one of the greatest contributions of ethnography to social scientific theory has been the systematic revelation of humanity as the classifying animal” (1973:214). Currently the classification system that overlaps all others is the binomial nomenclature of Western botany based on the phylogenetic and morphological relationship. In this article I will make a critical review of the history of the botanical classification that has been given to this plant.
Brief history of western classification of Agave
“Thinking is, to a large extent, categorizing” (Bourdin 2007). It is a mental process that consists in placing things that are different, but that have elements in common, in the same category. It is an essential way to abstract experiences from the world. Of course, agaves were already categorized for pre-Columbian societies. The population of which we have the greatest records is the Nahuatl of whom we have a rich oral, written, pictorial, architectural, and sculptural history. We can see that the maguey was a very important plant for their community, hence it was well classified and described. However, their classification system was not the same one that the Europeans would later impose.
Francisco Hernández, a spanish doctor and botanist, documented in the 16th century thousands of plants and animals based on the existing classifications of Nahua communities. He was able to generate the description of magueyes as nequámetl or honey agave; néxmetl, quámetl, hoitzitzílmetl, tapayáxmetl, acámetl, among others. Let’s be aware that in nahuatl there was already a binomial nomenclature, since metl means maguey and the accompanying term is a descriptor of the particular species. Hernández would then describe the plant in his own terms as follows:
“The metl produces a thick, short and fibrous root, leaves like aloes, but much larger and thicker, as they are sometimes the length of a medium-sized tree, with thorns on either side and ending in a hard and sharp point; stem three times larger, and at the end yellow, oblong flowers, star-shaped at the top, and later a seed very similar to that of asphodel. The uses of this plant are almost innumerable…”
Botanist Howard Scott Gentry, some centuries later, warned that the name metl did not always refer to the botanical category Agave, since the Nahuas sometimes classified plants of the family Bromeliaceae within the same group, since they superficially resemble the agave. Although some years earlier Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, a good friend of Charles Darwin, recognized that "of all cultivated plants, none is more difficult to name accurately than the species Agave [...] partly because of the impossibility of establishing its character with words."
Hooker, and even the mythical Darwin, were greatly influenced by a naturalist who established a paradigm shift for the study of life, and the discipline of taxonomy, that remains a reference for biology today: Carl Linnaeus. His insight made him develop and disseminate a binomial nomenclature system based on the morphology of each plant, which would allow it to be categorized into a basic and common conceptual level for observers, known as genus, and a subordinate but more specific level called species. This method has been the standard line of categorization in Western biology to date.
Linnaeus himself was the first to make a classification of the genus Agave in his renowned publication Species Plantarum in 1753. In this edition he included four different species of magueyes of which only three would remain, since a botanist after his time would relocate one of these species in the genus Furcraea (Gentry 1982).
The discovery of America for Europeans opened different trade routes and new aesthetic tastes; the new plants of the new continent represented a luxury for the horticulture of the colonial era. Different horticulturists dedicated themselves to reproducing and cultivating agave species that arrived from America. Thanks to them, the systematic Western categorization of the agave began to take shape. Some of the surnames that we read after each species are from these first groups of plant cultivators such as Carl Otto, Joseph Salm Dyck, and General von Jacobi. And it was not until 1833 when Joseph Zuccarini used flowers for the first time to make a more complete identification of agave.
All these descriptions were made in European orchards, on the other side of the Atlantic where each individual reproduced and documented their own magueyes. In this way, very few botanists were able to indicate the places of origin of these plants. By the 20th century, more methodological and in situ work began to be carried out on agaves, such as the study “Agaves of Mexico” by Trelease in 1920 and “Agaves of Guatemala” by Berger.
By the end of the century, the masterful treatise by the botanist Howard Scott Gentry managed to document 136 species in 20 genera with 197 differentiated taxa. Like Hooker, Gentry recognized the difficulty in classifying magueyes:
“many boundaries between groups are not precise, as is also the case with many species because the variation between agaves is gradual; a form or characteristic changes from one to another by a matter of degrees, a condition that also characterizes variation in other genera of the Agavaceae. Apparently the family has been slowly evolving for millions of years (Gentry 1982).
Currently, the classification of the agave under the standards of modern science is still in process. And it always will be because as Gentry himself says, the boundaries between varieties are never “precise.” It is important to recognize that biology, like any natural science, is not an exact science because life is not exact.
Modern genetics and the fugitive species concept seem to complicate rather than help solve the problem of classification. Therefore, the genera, species and even the agave family continue to be recomposed. In 2009 botany agreed to reconstitute the Agavaceae family into the subfamily Agavioideae to which the agave gives their name, and added this category to the Aspargaceae family, to which asparagus gives its name. A fact that seemed obvious to the past Spaniards who, when they had just arrived in America, when describing maguey, mentioned that it was a plant that grew similarly to the bulb of an onion or an asparagus.
Intermediate note: Up to this point I have narrated a brief taxonomic history of the agave. Reader, you can consider staying with some anecdotes about the history of the categorization of the maguey or consider continuing reading to begin a very winding path, but with beautiful and rich landscapes through the philosophy and anthropology of categorization of coexistence.
The importance of other taxonomies and a reflection on taxonomic hegemony
Categorizations have been assumed for a long time, but more recently they have been object of study for linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, neurologists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Some of these questions that arise are: are categories constructs of the human mind or are they based on the real world? What is the internal structure of these categories? How are these categories learned? Are they the same for everyone? How are categories and entities related?
Wittgenstein wrote that “a language contains a whole metaphysics.” This means that everything that makes up a language—its lexicon, its grammar, its phonetics, even its gestures—brings together the beliefs and perceptions of its speakers, since metaphysics is the philosophical study of those thoughts or passions that make us give an essence to things. In anthropology, the metaphysics of a human community is known as cosmology, which is the “more or less coherent set of representations about the form, content, and dynamics of the universe: its spatial and temporal categories, the types of entities that exist, the principles and powers that execute their origin and their future […] the word cosmos also designates the order of the universe.” (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 179).
Let's compare two “synonymous” terms to exemplify. Nahua speakers say ilhuicatl, “celebration place,” while romantic-language speakers say “firmament,” which means “something that holds and supports”, that is also why we say celestial vault. Both terms reflect the relationship that each society maintains with the starry sky that stimulates them, but their perception according to their way of living the world is different. The same thing happens with the words that we use to classify the rest of the things that surround us, they contain part of the beliefs and values that we attribute to a certain element. Thanks to categories we can reduce the chaos of the world to a meaningful form.
The classifications are metaphorical. That is why things are called by how they appear, whether in the scientific taxonomy or in other taxonomies. We have the case of Agave potatorum, which in Latin means 'drinker's maguey', surely due to its association with the mezcal production process recorded by Zuccerini or Agave rhodacantha, a maguey with red thorns. In Nahuatl we have papalómetl, butterfly maguey, or teómetl, divine maguey, the most common maguey from which pulque was extracted.
Currently, many people believe, mistakenly, that using the common and local denomination is less valid than the botanical denomination. It has greater prestige to pronounce a binomial nomenclature in Latin than in Nahuatl, binniza (Zapoteco), eneek (Huasteco), or nuu savi (Mixteco), which also have binomial nomenclatures. In fact, only the Latin label has credibility in the context of the science of biology, which produces an epistemological barrier to knowing the maguey in depth in its local context.
What happens is that it has also been incorrectly thought that non-scientific –non-Western, non-botanical, spiritual– nomenclatures are primitive and inherently deficient. You can read in “Agaves of Continental North America” the following:
It is, of course, understood that such unsophisticated naming systems are not botanically accurate, but are still useful for local communications. (Gentry 1982)
In the same way, the sociologists and ethnologists themselves who were beginning to base methodological studies with fewer racial and xenophobic biases have passages similar to the previous one. Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss state this hypothesis in a famous essay:
“The «primitives» have a pre-scientific vision of the natural world, attached to their totemic system, and their classification of the natural world becomes increasingly precise as their social structure becomes more complex” (Beaucage 2009).
However, despite these prejudices, his proposals began to start the serious studies of non-Western peoples.
The school of critical theory tells us that history does not occur in a linear progression, so we cannot consider peoples as more primitive or pre-scientific, but rather as the product of knowledge parallel to science that is still valid, and useful on its own terms and landscapes. As I wrote in another essay, under this tradition of history it is much more backward to see other peoples as primitive than to lack the wheel itself.
In fact, Gentry himself, with an internalized bias, but with the sensitivity that his collaborators say characterized him, also said that no matter what system of nomenclature the Nahuas used for maguey, it could hardly have been more inept than the one that the botanists had used for the last hundred years. No categorization is perfect, especially not in its own time. Even Linnaeus called the agave “aloe” within his Species Plantarum. This does not mean that his categorization paradigm was incorrect, rather that he needed clarifications that, indeed, arrived over the years. But, in general terms, its nomenclature and form of classification have survived because it is a strategic form that favors the knowledge of life. This does not mean it is better.
TTalking about Darwin as a mythical character is not a metaphor, in the sense that the cumulative impact of his theories was so revelatory for the scientific community of his day that his body of work became a kind of dogma. A dogma with real evidence, but that determines an order of the universe to which "we attribute powers that execute its origin and future," a cosmology. It is due to this order of importance that scientific classifications point towards a phylogenetic and chromosomal order related to morphology, although some of these relationships still remain unresolved between the genus Agave and its other close genera such as Manfreda, Polianthes, Prochnyanthes because they are of relatively recent origin according to the Agave molecular biologist José Luis Eguiarte.
Categorization is one of the most basic functions of living beings, but any categorization is done in terms of ranks. The color red, for example, designates a range of physical and perceptual properties of the real world, so that range is given a name. Even the evolutionary process of populations described by Darwin can only be understood in terms of ranges. The philosopher Timothy Morton cites Darwin himself as the most post-Darwinian thinker of all, as he wrote in the “Origin of Species” that in practical terms there is no difference between a species, a variety and a monstrosity.
Knowledge is power. Currently we can perceive an agenda of classification of maguey related to the control of certain populations for their monetization. Even the universities' own agenda is based on a colonial categorization to study territories where peoples of diverse customs live. The fact that horticulturists made their classifications in their European gardens was not inconsequential. They were forming categories with plants outside of their social and ecological context, forming categories purely rationally.
For many peasant communities, certainly for the Anáhuac communities, the fact of knowing could not be dissociated from their sensory experience. For example, for the Nahuas of the northern mountain range in Puebla it has been shown that it is not possible to distinguish between the experience of knowing and the sensory channel from which they come. The name of its senses goes like this: “what is known by the ear,” “what is known by the mouth,” “what is known by the nose,” “what is known by the eyes,” “what is known by the hands,” sixth and last, “what is known by the feet,” that is, rediscovering a familiar path or remembering. In this way we can understand that there is a feeling and thinking that is located in the body just in relation to the outside landscape.
Modern botany, like many other sciences, began as a deterritorialized knowledge, purely cognitive knowledge. Its categorization was made based on the importance of the knowledge that Darwin left as a legacy, but knowledge outside of an ecological context. What if the environmental debacle we’re living is because we are not located in a sensory environment, but only in a rationalized one? Our money is in the banks' digits, our knowledge in the cloud, and our experiences in virtual reality, not in the physical.
In a hyper-kinesthetic peasant experience, knowledge of the world can only make sense at the cost of the sensitization imposed by the body. For this reason, says Gabriel Bourdin, the knowing subject cannot present itself solely as a rational subject. Modern science believes that it can encompass everything, however, the Nahuas, as well as other indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, territorialized bodies, show us that the universe is relatively opaque, and humanity cannot but coexist with partial knowledge, often divergent, but always in perpetual coexistence with the environment.
References:
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10. Thiede, J. (2016, November). Phylogenetic status of the genus Agave (Asparagaceae) according to APG III. In Third International Symposium on Agave, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico (pp. 3-5).
11. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 1992 : « Cosmologie », in Pierre Bonte et Michel Izard (dir.), Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie, Paris, Presses universitaires de France: 178-180.
