Plants Matter
Exploring the Becomings of Plants and People
Editor(s) Luci Attala,Louise Steel
Language: English
Genre(s): Science
Series: Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology
- August 2023 · 224 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781837720484
- · eBook - pdf - 9781837720491
- · eBook - epub - 9781837720507
About The Book
Plants Matter explores how plants and people live together. This is not only a book about the importance of plants and how people use them, but it argues also that knowing the world is achieved-with plants. In addition to populating the landscape, plants alter human physiology in multiple material ways, through gatherings or through sensorial conversations using the chemistry of taste, perfume, colour, sound and textures. The chapters gathered in this volume offer a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that use ethnographic and ethnobotanical information to explore how the behaviours and capacities of certain plants around the world have enticed, excited and even seduced people to pay attention.
Endorsements
‘This book puts plants back among people and shows that paying attention to the people-plant relationship opens new ground for understanding the plant-filled world we live in.’
Jeremy Narby, co-author of Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge (2021)
‘What if plants were people who sense, discover, remember and decide just as people do? Who communicate amongst themselves, whose kith and kin are spread about, rooted in relations of filiation and descent, who breathe the wind and thirst for water? If only we humans could attend to what plants have to teach us, how much we could learn! Read this book, and find out for yourself.’
Tim Ingold, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Preface
1 Introduction: Talking of (and with) (the Materiality of) Plants
Luci Attala and Louise Steel
2 The Materiality of Plants: Plant–People Entanglements
Marijke Van der Veen
3 Plants as Medicine in the Anthropocene
Sarah E. Edwards
4 The World Tree: Humans, Trees and Creation on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
Falk Parra Witte
5 Composing with Plants: Discerning their Call
Julie Laplante and Kañaa
6 The Matter of Knowing Plant Medicine as Ecology: From Vegetal Philosophy and Plant Science to Tea Tasting in
the Anthropocene
Guy Waddell
7 Escaping to the Garden and Tasting Life
Sarah Page
8 ‘The crop that ruled our lives’: Memories of Tobacco among Former Growers in Australia
Andrew Russell
Index