The Banana Leaf is a Container Technology

relational architectures is a series that locates ways for design to operate through relationships built on solidarity.

The Banana Leaf is a container technology. The banana leaf holds, carries, nourishes, passes on ways of relating, brings home. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” essay she proposes redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag opposed to a weapon of domination. Le Guin’s essay argues that we should change the dominant narrative— the most pivotal technology was not the familiar hero’s tools of domination, but the carrier bag—a sack, medicine bundle, the container for that which nourishes, that which is passed along, that which is sacred. In “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,”¹ she posits how we’ve all heard the story of technology’s heroism expanding outwards in linear growth, but it is not often we hear the story of the holder, the recipient, the cultural carrier bag. “Before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home,” Le Guin writes. We build technologies as extensions of ourselves to shape, interact with, sense, and access the world around us; technologies emerge into whole cosmologies that feed into themselves². As unprecedented technological growth accelerates side by side with the collapse of the  climate crisis, technology is being urgently called upon to build newer solutions for the future of a dying world. But what we need is remembering: remembering the way we are connected to life on this Earth is the remedy that will help us understand how to coexist and continue life on this Earth. What would it mean to reorient the solutions we seek with technology towards the way we carry relationship?

Kamayan is a traditional Filipino celebratory feast where community gathers and eats by hand from a spread of food and flowers held on banana leaves. All is held by the banana leaf; the banana leaf acts as the table cloth, the plates, the placemat, and the substrate for a ceremony. This practice faded under colonial rule, first under Spanish colonization around 1565 and then further under American colonization around 1898, as eating off of a leaf with bare hands was deemed uncivilized³.  The more “civilized” act for colonization was hauling the banana trees to the Americas to be turned into a monoculture plantation market of exploitation⁴, human rights violations and environmental degradation; severing the connection between humans and land is a foundational pillar of domination.  The chasm between the stories of technologies Le Guin contrasts—the carrier bag of seeds and stars and the “linear, progressive, time’s (killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic”.

The first tropical fruit to be cultivated on an industrial scale, the export of bananas⁵ under 20th-century U.S. and European colonialism  “advertised as bringing ‘modernity’ to tropical regions and making use of a ‘useless’ jungle”⁶. Bananas are now amongst the largest industrialized agricultural exports; the Philippines are among the top five exporters⁷. As a marker of colonial industrialization, bananas are the crop experiencing the most genetic cloning and one of the largest consumers of agrochemicals. These processes are detrimental to natural ecosystems, biodiversity and soil health, the effects of which are disregarded as “factors of production”. Massacres of both humans and land stain the ground that expedites production of bananas⁸. The efforts of the western world to mitigate its consequences on the Earth are all too often technosolutions disembodied from the root of our crises. Can we remember relationships with the plants themselves that hold the foundations of coexistence? 

Kamayan translates to “by hand”.  In Kamayan, to eat is visceral in the way we feel through our hands. Le Guin defines technology as the way we interface with the world and bare hands, stripped of tools, are intimate interfaces. The hands are one of the most touch-sensitive parts of the body, each finger tip containing over 3,000 sensory receptors⁹. We orient ourselves in tune with our environment through sensing, the way we sense is a relationship with this world we walk. Hands feel the oils and juices of life. In the intricacies between fingers, Kamayan gives us an embodied connection to the earth where the food came from. Eating food is one of our closest innate connections to the Earth. Pre-colonial Filipino folk beliefs are rooted in the philosophy that humans descend from nature and return to nature after death, promoting deep reverence and responsibility for the Earth¹⁰. 

When we eat, we participate in the cycle of life. Food is the manifest of seeds that contain worlds. Underground in the chtonic belly of the Earth, with just the right conditions in the soil for life, the body of plants sprout above the surface to harness the energy of the sun. The plants, tended by stewards of the land, harvested and prepared by working hands, are received in our body, and through this we access the energy of that bright ball of fire that lights up our universe. The act of eating is one of metabolism, Earth’s natural cycles necessary for life are of planetary metabolism¹⁰, and to dream with Earthly metabolism is to nourish that which nourishes us. When banana leaves go back into the Earth, they enhance microbial diversity and metabolism in the soil that holds our feet every day¹¹. We are at all times interwoven through the great exchange with decaying life, recomposing fertility,  fecundity in the cycles of the seasons, the cycles of our bodies, the cycles that work with death to bring life. The sacredness in how everything is sourced from and given to the Earth for the pathways for life to continue, the foundation of reciprocity.  While the dominating technologies today are salient with futurity, the banana leaf as container technology is one that carries a remembrance—remembering how we are in relationship with the world so that we nourish that which nourishes us. A cycle to break a cycle, like a spell that breaks a spell.