Dissertation: Cartographies of roots Thomas (original) (raw)

2019, Dissertation

This study uses oral history and auto-ethnography to collect thematic data on relationships and communication between plants and people in New Mexico, USA. Western and industrial cultures tend to be plant-blind, which is extremely dangerous in the wake of climate disruption and associated loss of biodiversity. This study works to collect and produce generative narratives of non-binary relationships between humans and plants that provide remedies for plant-blindness and hopeful connections between human and more- than-human worlds. Results indicated the existence of many positive relationships between plants and people in the Western world, and that these relationships develop through human-human communication, plant-human communication, place-making, and relation-making practices. Furthermore, results showed clearly how relationships between humans and plants are wrapped up in history, sense-of-place, family, and identity, positioning studies about plants as an extremely potent topic for ecocultural studies.

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Introduction to Special Collection: Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: The Co-Production of Plant-People Lifeworlds

Journal of Ethnobiology, 2024

Ethnobiology has long recognized that human and plant relationships produce particular ways of living. The discipline is increasingly asking how these lifeworlds reflect and create sociopolitical formations-from low-impact hunting-gathering or slash-and-burn agriculture, to colonial plantations and runaway settlements, to contemporary agribusiness and alternative biodynamic agriculture. In this special issue, we propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis to highlight the ways in which plants and people are co-produced. We explore entanglements between plants and people over time, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic and historical research to offer new and critical insights into the ways that plant-human lifeworlds co-produce one another-from the processes of racialization in plantation societies to the aspirational interventions of gardeners, farmers, and scientists aiming for redemption from chemical industrial agriculture. The collection centers on acts of reciprocal human and botanical labor through a variety of contexts and perspectives in crop fields, including: how monocrops and plantations reshape socioecological life; ritual dimensions of plant-human interactions; and the regenerative alternatives that re-imagine plant-human relations and agro-ecological possibilities amid the historical weight of extractivist agriculture in plant-anthropo-worlds.

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Be Kin With the Plant Inhabitant: From Plant Humanities Initiative to Plant South Salesroom

Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 2023

Emerging from the discourse of environmental humanities, plant humanities debuted at Dumbarton Oaks in 2018 as an interdisciplinary field. As living species, plants possess both biological and cultural attributes, holding unparalleled socio-cultural significance. This article recollects the author’s journey of encountering plant humanities in the 2020 Plant Humanities Summer Program, and co-initiating an action group in China, Plant South Salesroom, to promote the burgeoning plant-matters idea among wider audience. Plant South Salesroom raised the phrase “Zhiwu Shimin” (植物世民, Plant Inhabitant) to get rid of the ingrained plant blindness and open potential dialogues between scientific and humanities studies. It makes the modified research framework of plant humanities more accessible. Rooted in the plant humanities studies, Plant South Salesroom has conducted diverse public-engaged practices at local cultural space, combined with culture-oriented creation and spread. The activities of Plant Walk, Plant Life Interview, Local Plant Post, and Plant Tabloid facilitate the participants start to appreciate plants in the original form and be kin with them. Reciprocally, the feedback received during the practices and the insights captured under the perspective of plants also enriched the existing plant humanities studies.

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Keeping life going: Plants and people today, yesterday and tomorrow

Social Compass

I review the contributions to this special issue by focusing on the relational qualities that bind people and plants together through religious ritualization of economic activities such as crop cultivation or plant gathering in the wild. I show how an attention to plants as teachers facilitates cross-cultural comparative analysis.

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Plant Worlds: Assembling the Ethnobotanical

TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly, 2018

Without plants, life on earth as we know it simply could not exist. In terms of sheer mass, plants dominate terrestrial ecosystems, with one thousand times more plant than animal biomass on land (Bar-on et al. 2018). Within this vital mass is incredibly diversity: according to recent estimates, there are just shy of four hundred thousand species of plants in the world (Willis 2017). The significance of this is as much cultural as it is ecological. All human societies rely on plants in myriad ways – as resources, as symbols, as ideas, as cohabitants. And like an optical illusion, while often going completely unnoticed, the centrality of plants to social life, once seen, cannot be unseen. Just as they do in ecosystems, plants underpin and thread their way through human social worlds with grace and tenacity.

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Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography

Progress in Human Geography, 2021

Attention to plant life is currently flourishing across the social sciences and humanities. This paper introduces recent work in the informal sub-discipline of 'vegetal geography', placing it into conversation with the transdisciplinary field of 'critical plant studies' [CPS], a broad framework for re-evaluating plants and humanplant interactions informed by principles of agency, ethics, cognition and language. I explore three key themes of interest to multispecies scholars looking to attend more closely to vegetal life, namely: (1) plant otherness; (2) plant ethics; (3) plant-human attunements, in the hope of encouraging greater cross-pollination between more-than-human geography and critical plant studies.

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