Pious natures: plant cultures in urban Pakistan

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ABSTRACT We argue that forms of Islamic religious performance have fused with late capitalism to create pious natures – forms of human-plant relationship oriented towards religious consumption, pan-Islamic nature-culture, and nationalist projects of the militarist-nation state. Focusing on urban Pakistan, we aim to provincialize the tendency in Western, progressive studies of nature to posit multispecies alliances and multispecies intimacy as routes to better futures. We also seek to redress the way plants are treated as abstract matter in critical scholarship emphasizing inequality and dispossession in the urban green. We note that piety is pervasive in Pakistan, from the way state presents itself geopolitically to how individuals reflexively conform to, or contest, Islamic values. Our analysis shows that intimacy between people and plants in urban Pakistan’s exclusionary vegetal geographies cannot be understood without attention to the wider production of a culture of nature. This culture of nature, we show, involves: conformity to religious ideals; the mobilization of human-plant relations as a performance conveying piety to others; a reflexive, knowing and subversive stance towards piety that leaves room for alternative expressions. We analyse private and military uses of plants in contemporary Pakistani urbanism, drawing on interviews conducted with homeowners, working-class maali (gardeners), state and military horticultural planners, and plant nursery owners.