Sowing the Seeds: Anthropological Contributions to Agrobiodiversity Studies

Abstract Agrobiodiversity studies have been a longstanding and current research focus of anthropological inquiry. This article gives an overview of important ongoing anthropological topics of agrobiodiversity research including conservation, cultural memory, farmer decision making, and homegarden studies. It also points to future directions in agrobiodiversity research that have been understudied to date including agrobiodiversity and its relationship to climate change and migration, the potential marriage of agrobiodiversity and food studies, agrobiodiversity in the Global North, and the incorporation of agrobiodiversity into emergent sustainable/alternative agriculture systems. Agricultural anthropology is suggested as a potential holistic subdiscipline for incorporating anthropological studies of agrobiodiversity, which are currently not unified by any theoretical framework.