Human-plant Relations Research Articles

Personal encounters with trees: The lived significance of the private urban forest

Private trees are an important element in the social relations of urban landscapes, contributing intensely personal and highly textured experiences of memory, place and emotion. Drawing on emerging theoretical interest in human–plant relations, we report encounters with trees in gardens, and the effects of these encounters on decision-making, from semi-structured interviews in home gardens in the Melbourne suburb of Fairfield, Australia. Trees were experienced as active participants in urban life in five main ways: as producers of wanted and unwanted products, as messengers of social information, as reference points to places and experiences, as significant others, and as members of the community. We show how, in the residential context, nuanced and highly individual experiences of trees are critical in shaping the private urban forest. The urban forest can be planned and managed in ways that acknowledge this lived experience of trees as active participants in the fabric of urban life.

Performing weeds: Gardening, plant agencies and urban plant conservation

Private domestic gardens have been the site of diverse inquiry in both the social and natural sciences. Intersected by these inquiries this paper focuses on how ‘weeds’ are (re)constituted through gardening practices in domestic gardens in Christchurch, New Zealand. The paper arises out of an interdisciplinary ecological and social scientific study of the factors influencing the distribution and regeneration of 12 bird-dispersed native woody species from Riccarton Bush, an urban forest remnant of significant ecological rarity, into surrounding residential properties. As part of this study we were especially interested in how people’s everyday experiences and encounters in their gardens guide their gardening practices and what possibilities, if any, these create for self-introduced native seedlings to establish, and mature into adults. Drawing inspiration from literatures on human–plant relations we use the concepts of performance, non-human and ‘planty’ agencies to argue that weeds are performed by people and plants rather than having a pre-determined or pre-figured meaning. Empirically the paper seeks to highlight the diverse, unique and disruptive agencies of plants. Methodologically it reflects on ways of engaging with and researching human–plant relations. In concluding, the paper examines how concepts of performance, non-human and planty agencies can provide insights for weed management and urban plant conservation.

Knowing Apples

This essay employs a first-person fictional narrator to explore the nature of human-plant relations through the example of Thoreau’s Wild Apples and enacts the transformational process necessary to write in conjunction with non-conscious vegetal life by paying attention to the unthought known of the vegetative soul.

BEANS BEFORE THE LAW: Knowledge Practices, Responsibility, and the Paraguayan Soy Boom

This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay's rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay's modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers's cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity. [legal activism, response, responsibility, knowledge practices, modernity, human–plant relations, frontiers, agrarian transitions, rural politics]

Ethnobotany in the new Europe: people, health and wild plant resources

text itself is useful, entertaining, and informative. In addition, each chapter is a model for modern ethnobotanical studies. Rather than simply cataloguing plant use, each researcher analyzes the historical, societal, economic, or political aspects relevant to changes in human plant usage. Thus, the authors provide a true ethnobotanical resource that can be instructive to academic audiences. * Choice The study of European wild food plants and herbal medicines is an old discipline that has been invigorated by a new generation of researchers pursuing ethnobotanical studies in fresh contexts. Modern botanical and medical science itself was built on studies of Medieval Europeans' use of food plants and medicinal herbs. In spite of monumental changes introduced in the Age of Discovery and Mercantile Capitalism, some communities, often of immigrants in foreign lands, continue to hold on to old recipes and traditions, while others have adopted and enculturated exotic plants and remedies into their diets and pharmacopoeia in new and creative ways. Now in the 21st century, in the age of the European Union and Globalization, European folk botany is once again dynamically responding to changing cultural, economic, and political contexts. The authors and studies presented in this book reflect work being conducted across Europe's many regions. They tell the story of the on-going evolution of human-plant relations in one of the most bioculturally dynamic places on the planet, and explore new approaches that link the re-evaluation of plant-based cultural heritage with the conservation and use of biocultural diversity. Manuel Pardo-de-Santayana is a Senior Lecturer of botany and ethnobotany at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He has been researching contemporary and historical uses of Spanish medicinal and wild food plants, homegardens, and folk botanical taxonomies at the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid (CSIC) and the School of Pharmacy (University of London) since 1995. Andrea Pieroni is an Associate Professor of plant biology and ethnobotany at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Northern Italy. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine and the President of the International Society of Ethnobiology. His research focuses on food and medical ethnobotany in the Mediterranean and in the Balkan areas, and among migrant communities and diasporas in Europe. Rajindra K. Puri is a Senior Lecturer in environmental anthropology and ethnobiology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. While his primary research area is Indonesian Borneo, he also supervises M.Sc. and Ph.D. students who conduct ethnobotanical research in Europe. With Christian Vogl he co-organizes a summer field school in the Austrian Alps on methods in ethnobotany and works with the Global Diversity Foundation in Morocco, Malaysia and Namibia.

The Utility of Ethnobiology in Agricultural Origins Research

Whereas early anthropological research on agricultural origins proposed global explanations for the transition, recent work has demonstrated that different regions followed distinct pathways to food production based on local environmental and social conditions (Bellwood 2005; Denham et al. 2007), requiring us to develop theories that explain manipulation of plants or animals in specific areas. Periodic dialogues between regions and disciplines, such as the collection of perspectives in this special issue, are vital to understanding (a) global similarities and contrasts in agriculture’s causes and consequences, and (b) whether food production can be attributed to a single ultimate cause (Cohen 2009, in this issue) or multiple factors and constraints operating at different geographical and temporal scales (Bettinger et al. 2009, in this issue; Zeder 2006). Although directly dated macroremains and fauna can show what, when, and where crucial changes in human behavior occurred (Winterhalder and Kennett 2009, in this issue), explaining these changes requires using modern frames of reference (Denham 2008). Human behavioral ecology (HBE) studies (Kennett and Winterhalder 2006; Winterhalder and Goland 1997), discussed by several issue participants, take an important step forward in this regard, using economic principles to suggest why humans might have decided to begin manipulating plants. However, focusing primarily on human decisions emphasizes the “human” side of a complex interplay between two or more organisms, restricting the kinds of explanations that may be offered (see Zeder 2006; her fig. 1). Such limits do not undercut the value of insights derived from HBE, but suggest that complementary approaches with more focal flexibility are also desirable. Ethnobiology and allied disciplines (ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and ethnoecology) can address this need. While ethnobiological studies certainly examine human decision-making processes, they focus on interactions between humans, other organisms, and larger environmental units. Because such interactions are iterative, multiple standpoints (human, plant, animal, or environment centered) for observation are helpful. The relevance of such observations to explanations of early food production has long been recognized (Anderson 1952; Harlan 1999; Hastorf 1998), albeit with caveats (Hillman 2007, 17). For specific instances of domestication in welldefined areas, carefully constructed relational analogies (Wylie 1985) can provide solid links between the archaeological subject and the present-day ethnobiological data source on the basis of relevant shared attributes. Ethnobiological studies can enhance explanations of food production in several ways. Here, I use examples from southwest Ethiopia to show how such research can clarify local processes of plant domestication. First, basic observations expand the known domain of human-plant relations, illustrating how humans and plants interact. Second, investigating the cultural, environmental, and biological factors that shape human-plant interactions can show why humans might manipulate plants. Third, detailed knowledge of plants and environments can help us discern which specific human actions, situated in particular contexts, might amplify interdependence between humans and plants, and which would not. Finally, broader ethnobiological data sets help build models for hunting and gathering economies, which in turn can generate hypotheses concerning early food production.