Botanical Ontologies Special Section of the Journal of Ethnobiology Post-Face

Abstract

A new scientific consensus has slowly emerged at the dawn of the 21 century: plants play a fundamental role in ecosystem functioning, hence in sustaining life on earth (e.g. MEA 2005). If plants did not exist, the good working of human societies would not be possible (e.g. Kaua’i Declaration 2007). Despite their central importance, and despite the recognition that human life is contingent upon their existence, plants are often poorly appreciated (Hall 2011:17). As the nature/culture dualism that has been so central to Euro-American thought traditions starts breaking down, we are better placed to understand why plants, which dominate the biosphere, have become largely invisible, and why the question of human/plant relationships has not received the academic attention it deserves (e.g. Rival 1998). A first explanation is that the plant world is often confused with nature, and nature apprehended as a backdrop to human activity (e.g. Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995), rather than as a landscape dense with living entanglements, as in so many indigenous cultures (e.g. Kohn 2013). Now that the dismissal of plants as passive resources is giving way to a recognition of their biological complexity, plant scientists are debating whether plant awareness should be discussed in terms of “plant neurobiology” or in terms of “signaling behavior” instead (Chamovitz 2012). Plants may be brainless, but their complex sensory and regulatory difference allows them to modulate their growth in response to ever-changing conditions (Harberd 2006), an intelligence that our anthropocentric worldview may ultimately destroy (Harberd 2006:211, 299). Becoming aware of plant awareness poses special challenges to anthropology. With the discipline increasingly bent on showing that “nature” is always and everywhere socially and culturally constructed, we are left to wonder, as I have argued elsewhere, what place should be accorded to the rich data gathered and analyzed by plant scientists and biologists more generally (Rival 2014). Can anthropologists turned ethnobotanists develop a single analytical framework to account for the conceptual and practical dimensions of all people’s knowledge of plants? Is this what looking ontologically at relations between humans and plants entails? These are very important questions, which relate to the concern raised in the introduction regarding the relationship between ontology and epistemology