Paper short abstract:

Is it possible to portrait an epidemic of plants with the tools of the anthropology of death? The banana population of South Kivu has recently been disappearing due to a destructive bacterium. This loss takes among local farmers the form of a collective event comparable to a cultural grief.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries there has been a deep exchange between the Bashi, native community of the hills around Bukavu, and the banana groves that populate the area. Banana trees are a very important presence of the inhabited space and many gestures and activities take place around it, shaping the Shi symbolic universe. Today, however, banana groves are progressively disappearing due to the spread of a plant disease called Banana Xanthomonas Wilt. Looking at human and plant groups as communities embedded in a network of reciprocal relationships, I analyze the perceptions and consequences related to the loss of banana groves as ecological disaster. In particular, the concept of cultural grief, borrowed from the work of Roberto Beneduce (2004) on politics of death, becomes useful to explain the crisis of presence experienced by farmers facing this environmental transformation, that arouses perceptions of cultural emptiness and a sense of the end of the world. Nevertheless, as Ernesto De Martino (1977) reminded us, the end of a world does not coincide with the end of the world. Every catastrophe brings with it regeneration, the opening of new scenarios and different futures imagined by younger generations. My research shows that this disappearance from the native ecological horizon is generating new cultural processes and practices. From the theoretical point of view, the analysis tries to push the anthropological discipline beyond the human, to introduce multispecies narratives (Haraway 2016) in ethnography, to bring out the importance of the plant social network, and to begin to trace new representations.