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Paper short abstract

Olive groves in Sicily, Italy, are sites of more-than-human kin relations, describing a “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2011). This more-than-human (re)generational constellation does work “to renew life”, not without embodied patterns of violence, in a context of economic and environmental crisis.

Paper long abstract

Coming out of 14 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork and ten years of ongoing presence in the field, this paper aims to contribute to the panel with a case study of small- to medium-scale oliviculture, or the production of olives, and olive oil, from Sicily, Italy. Sicily has long been framed as a land rife with violence and loss, particularly vis a vis the political and intimate violence of the mafia and the state. Sicily, historically agricultural, also faces environmental degradation and ruination in the form of climate change and its impacts: prolonged drought and dramatic weather events, like that caused by the recent Cyclone Harry. Rather than focusing on loss, and inspired by the Convenors’ bringing together of “generations” (Ingold 2023) as “collaborative entwinements working to renew life” and “regeneration” (Durham and Cole 2007), I focus on what participants speak of and practice in what I call their praxis of care (Hilton 2022) of oliviculture, or why they choose not to abandon an increasingly precarious livelihood, and instead (for now), to stay on the land. As the convenors note, kin relations are central to interspecies relations. I argue that Sicilian oliviculturalists with whom I work are generational in that they work to renew life, but question if they are regenerational, or if, and how, their praxis reproduces certain violences. In doing so I frame oliviculture as more-than-human “interembodiment” (Bunkley 2022), and olive trees as sentient kin (Hilton 2025), with kinship implying a "mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2011).