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- Convenors:
-
Anna Zadrożna
(Institute of Anthropology, University of Gdańsk)
Aliaksandra Shrubok (Uppsala University)
Iwa Kolodziejska (Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw)
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Short Abstract:
This panel explores the potential/existing roles plants (can)play in urban areas and in the (un)doing of politics and practices of urban governance. It concerns the questions of political representation and urban citizenship of plants and the ways of (un)doing ethnographies with plants.
Long Abstract:
As the climate crisis unfolds with growing unpredictability, urban natures emerge as crucial for the flourishing of (non)human lives. Nevertheless, the profoundly anthropocentric approach that dominates (the language of) governance disregards non-human agencies and existing entanglements. In cities, nature is controlled: plants are reduced to resources and ‘done’ into categories of aesthetically (un)pleasant and (un)useful (for humans or other species). But plants resist: they (dis)appear, spread, grow, and (un)do spatial and political categories. The questions of entanglements, citizenship, agency, and political representation emerge as crucial for rethinking the manifold roles plants (can)play in cities, politics, and ethnographies.
This panel explores the potential/existing roles plants (can)play in urban areas and in the (un)doing of politics and practices of urban governance, and the ways of (un)doing ethnographies with plants. We invite papers concerning the following themes:
Urban citizenship: Rights and response-abilities of plants; Roles plants (can)play in the creation of “green” cities and futures in times of planetary crisis; Spaces and practices of (un)doing in urban governance; reflections on non-human citizenship;
Political representation: How/when are plants (re)present(ed) in politics; Phytocommunicability; Representation by ‘human proxies’ (Gray et al, 2020); Key concepts/values/beliefs that underpin urban/green/eco politics;
Practices of removal and resistance: Marginalia, weeds, vegetal agency;
Forms of entanglements that emerge if politics are (un)done with plants;
(Un)doing ethnography with plants: forms of representation, genres, response-abilities; roles plants (can)play in research and writing; ways of communicating with plants; anthropology as 'applied' with plants;
Premises of plantocene: imaginations, possibilities, practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Viola Di Tullio (LUISS, Rome and IUSS, Pavia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores plants as active subjects in urban contexts. Plants respond, resist or allow human activities and politics. The ethnography in Lucca, engaging tree climbers, exposes practices of intimacy and attention, contributing to new moral imaginaries in urban plant ethics and politics.
Paper long abstract:
Coluche, a renowned French comedian, suggested that for a true ecologist to be elected president, trees should be granted the right to vote. Starting from this, the paper reflects on the possibility of considering plants as active subjects and explores their agency and interests within urban contexts. Grounded in the assumption that plants are flourishing, goal-oriented entities, I align with Sandler’s position in the philosophical debate, asserting that biological interests determine plants’ well-being and thus their welfare (2018). Viewing plants as entities with their own interests and needs opens the possibility of exploring their role in the (un)doing of urban contexts and governance decisions. I argue that, in urban settings, plants adopt an ontological state of hybridity (in the Latourian sense), being both active subjects and “political artefacts” (Rival 1998), shaping and being shaped by urban policies.
By attentively “noticing” (Tsing 2015) their actions, responses, and reactions to human politics, we can investigate vegetal agency, often invisible but adjusting, resisting, and rebelling against human actions. This ethnographic research was conducted, in the city of Lucca, Italy, among tree climbers, i.e. the individuals engaged in the pruning of trees. Their work reveals relationships of intimacy, ethics of care, and practices of attention and communication between humans and plants. In conclusion, through ethnographic research, this paper explores the practices, imaginaries and possibilities of care generated around human-plant interactions. The aim is the construction of a novel approach to urban ethics and politics concerning plants’ rights and their role in shaping the city.
gomathy kn (University of Hyderabad)
Paper short abstract:
Dominant anthropological discourse on organic food gardening tend to be anthropocentric, privileging the role of humans, thereby muting the agency of non-humans in the process. This paper tries to redefine urban food gardening as an animistic performance of kinship by both humans and non-humans.
Paper long abstract:
Two of the many problems associated with rapid urbanization are food safety and waste management. In the case of South Indian City of Thiruvananthapuram, India, the past decade has witnessed awareness and alarm from media reports of increased amount of pesticide residue in imported vegetables and fruits. This led to a policy of 'self sufficiency' in vegetable production. Growbags with seeds, compost bins, lab cultured microorganisms, bio-fertilizers, biogas plants, irrigation tubes, and so on began to be supplied by the State to city residents to take up home gardening and in situ waste management. This paper is based on an ethnographic study among 150 elderly urban residents engaged in this process. Following the new materialistic, and more-than-human turn in social sciences, this chapter tries to challenge the idea of gardening as a human-designed activity, where the non-humans (plants, pests, and things) are mere beings or instruments fulfilling human purposes. Instead, it seeks to look at gardening as an assemblage, foregrounding the intentional ‘doings’ of all entities, human and non-human. In the process gardening emerges beyond growing food; gardening emerges as the animistic performance of kinship. Thus it also highlights how human-environmental relations in built environments are integral to healthy and happy ageing.
Beatriz Mutter Quindere Fraga (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how, in moments of crisis, European city dwellers often create green refuges at home to escape dangerous urban environments. By filling their houses with plants, people seek to produce idyllic jungles, spaces that question our imaginaries of wilderness, nature, and plant agency.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on an often hidden, albeit ubiquitous, aspect of urban greenery: houseplants. In periods of uncertainty and difficulty in accessing green spaces, many European city inhabitants seek to replicate natural environments at home. In the Victorian period, air pollution plagued large British cities, leading to an increase in the construction of conservatories at middle-class houses. Similarly, in the early 2020s, the Covid-19 pandemic meant that the urban air had become dangerous. Consequently, the requirement to stay at home stimulated many to improve their domestic spaces, often by cultivating houseplants. In both cases, the fascination with urban jungles reflects a desire to create what is imagined to be an Edenic nature in domestic spaces. Tropical plants thus become urban citizens apparently under the complete control of humans. Nevertheless, houseplants are quick to take over their new homes. This intimate proximity between city dwellers and their plants enables a renewed sensibility to plant agency. It is by trying to create and control the jungle and its inhabitants that indoor gardeners come to understand that plants are not easily subjugated, but rather have strong desires and agency. Attempts to create green indoor spaces can thus lead to new imaginaries of wilderness, nature, and plant agency. Drawing on historical research and ongoing fieldwork with European houseplant collectors, this paper seeks to understand forms of political representation and urban citizenship of houseplants.
Anna Zadrożna (Institute of Anthropology, University of Gdańsk)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in two metropolitan cities: Istanbul and Gdańsk, this paper explores the possibilities of more-than-human flourishing as materialized in strategies and practices of governance of green areas and plants.
Paper long abstract:
With its empirical focus on Gdańsk and Istanbul, this paper explores possibilities—for more-than-human flourishing, rethinking hierarchies between different living beings, and creating sustainable futures—as a material reality and as a cultural fact (Appadurai, et al 2013) that manifest themselves in politics and practices of governance: in narratives on the future present in strategic plans and legal documents, in everyday politics on the ground, and in the material qualities of green areas and plants. The focus is on those whose future(s) seem most at stake: plants of metropolitan cities, especially (but not limited to) plants regarded as "weeds." In alternative to (nihilistic) Anthropocene visions of the future, plants become frontline climate survivors, the main subjects in the Plantocene. Meanwhile, the agencies of plants—less communicative or less charismatic—remain excluded from legislation, urban plans, or even more-than-human studies. This paper scrutinizes the manifold ways in which plants are/can be present and active in politics, both as material realities and as represented by human proxies. It analyzes selected green areas of Istanbul and Gdańsk as materializations of politics and as embodiments of the future(s). Thereafter, by drawing on case studies, it addresses the question of political representation of plants: who, under what conditions, and by whom is represented in politics, and who remains silenced, when, and why.
Emilie Guitard (French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS))
Paper short abstract:
In Ibadan, certain plants are given a particular agentivity while being the object of attachments by citizens. But they are also at the heart of a competition between religions, and threatened by authorities favouring building and land speculation, while claiming an urban sustainable governance.
Paper long abstract:
In the large city of Ibadan (Nigeria), with a predominantly Yoruba population, large trees that have survived despite land pressure are often attributed an agency by city dwellers, "asé" : associated with the living, and in particular with plants, this 'force' inherent in these old trees requires to interact with them with care and precaution, in the same way as with fellow citizens and any 'social partner'. These conceptions go with strong attachments to these plant elements, linked to the history of the city and its founding lineages, but also their position in its socio-political organisation.
However, in a context of increasing competition between Yoruba religion and other Muslim or Christian cults, these trees have been under threat because of the same conceptions and attachments to which they are subject. The city dwellers attached to them also often find themselves powerless in the face of abrupt interventions by the urban authorities, tending to favour concrete and land speculation over plants, even though they may also claim a certain ecological concern echoing the "sustainable city" urban model promoted by international funding agencies.
Interactions with plants in Ibadan thus help us to complexify conceptions of relations to plants in the city, in contrast to an ancient vision of the city as against nature, the anthropocentric proposals of an approach in terms of 'socio-ecological systems' taken up by the 'sustainable city' model, and the essentialist stereotype of an 'African animist thought', 'traditionally' benevolent towards nature, particularly popular in the West at the moment.