Paper short abstract:

Mushroom picking in the Greek Macedonian village of Kalloni is a highly ritualised practice that incorporates a plethora of social connotations. A usually dormant social space, the village comes alive as the mushroom season activates social networks of embodied history and knowledge. Mushroom picking accommodates the intergenerational transmission of indigenous knowledge that highlights a rich arena of inter-species interaction.

Paper long abstract:

Each autumn the village of Kalloni in Greek Macedonia is woken from its usual seasonal slumber by groups of mushroom hunters. Since the former inhabitants migrated to surrounding towns during the 1940s and 1950s for social and economic reasons, Kalloni has gradually become deserted outside of the summer months. The mushroom picking season instigates particular social networks of embodied knowledge and history.

History is relived through mushroom picking and embodied knowledge transmitted. Children have never been allowed to participate in the activity, but nevertheless successive generations continue with what has become a highly ritualised practice. Knowledge of the landscape and edible species is transferred on these excursions, partially de-shrouding the mystification of inside knowledge. The practice has become culturally proximate; an activity that links dispersed actors to their ancestral village. Mushroom picking is a practice that enlivens otherwise dormant social spaces and activates networks of knowledge and embodied history. Thus mushrooms not only help produce a dynamic social arena of discernment, but also transform the social space.

Paper short abstract:

We show how mode of reproduction in houseplants serves to increase biological fitness through selection and distribution through informal human social networks, and how those same modes lend themselves to the articulation and maintenance of social networks, instantiating memories and meanings, and providing opportunities for plant based narratives.

Paper long abstract:

In the contemporary UK, as in most of Europe and the 'neo-Europes', the networks involved in plant exchange are heavily dominated by flows between commercial seed producers, smaller producers and domestic growers. Nevertheless, informal networks remain important, even if they have to be understood within a wider system of relations and flows, including commodity chains. The houseplant sub-economy as a sphere of exchange still relies to a significant extent on propagules obtained through informal exchange, and although when measured in monetary terms the value is small, social, ecological and genetic impact is disproportionately large. Moreover, houseplants provide us with a cultural domain in which a variety of forms of exchange are displayed that take place independent of the formal monetary economy or at the interface with it. This paper shows how plant reproductive material increases its biological fitness through selection and distribution through human social networks and how humans massively increase the diversity and utility of plant matter by re-distributing it. Moreover, modes of plant propagation at the same time lend themselves to the articulation and maintenance of those same networks, instantiating memories and providing opportunities for plant based narratives. The exchange of plant germplasm through the 'houseplant sub-economy' reinforces yet again the claim that what we loosely call 'gifts' and perceive as trivial, secondary and outside the realm of social control, are in fact 'recurrent, predictable and socially regulated' in Western industrial societies, with hidden social and ecological consequences arising from their symbolic and spatially prominent contexts.

Paper short abstract:

We analyse the characteristics of ‘plantiness’, and discuss their implications for plant agency and human-plant relations.

Paper long abstract:

The more-than-human turn in the social sciences has focused more on human relations with animals than plants. In this paper we push these discussions further by paying attention to the category 'plant', and by trying to take plants seriously on their own terms. Since what counts as a plant is contingent and has evolved over time, we consider first plantiness as the diverse material expression of five characteristics and capacities, collected in a living organism. Plantiness helps make humanness possible but it does not need humans. We then consider how plantiness structures plant agency, and what this means for two types of encounter - the ethnographic encounter, and that between humans and plants. Examples are drawn from our field research in Australia and Canada.

Paper short abstract:

This paper includes an interpretation of the Directives within the context of EU law, and looks at the effects upon the ‘natural medicine community’, how people are responding to them, through compliance or transgression, and issues of governance and the body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is co-authored by an EU lawyer and an anthropologist. Firstly, it examines the EU Directives on Herbal Medicinal Products within the wider context of EU law, including the regulatory intention, legal techniques and scope of the legislation. Secondly, using ethnographic data, the paper explores the implications for and effects on the natural health community, and how people are responding to the directives, through compliance or transgression. Here, we take 'natural health community' to mean those who produce, sell and use herbal medicinal products; at this stage, the scope of the study is confined to Great Britain. The 'natural health community' in Great Britain, however, is not homogenous because the regulations also apply to Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine in addition to European Herbal Remedies, which raises ethical and philosophical issues relating to liberty and rights to cultural beliefs and practices, and also questions as to how different parts of the community have been informed and updated on the changes in law. Drawing theoretically from Foucault to Irigaray, this paper finally highlights how these Directives reflect paternalistic approaches to our relationship with the 'natural' world and socio-cultural 'knowledges' which exist outside of hegemonic discourses. Additionally, questions are raised as to why at the same time that there is a predominance of softer paternalistic approaches actively encouraging self-help, other forms of making healthy choices are being intensely governed.