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

Abstract

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.