Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the cosmology of gardens among the Makushi people of Amazonian Guyana. Via a study of Makushi gardening, I show how indigenous notions of aesthetics are understood in "multispecies" terms, emerging from the cross-species encounters that constitute the diverse world of the garden.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the cosmology of gardens among the indigenous Makushi people of Amazonian Guyana. The Makushi are subsistence hunters, fishers, and farmers, and as such interact with other kinds of beings in every dimension of their daily lives. They are expert horticulturalists, in that they exhibit and utilise specialised knowledge and techniques relating to the ecology of cultivated plants - most notably, the staple crop bitter cassava (kîse). Cast in the light of innumerable shades of green and adorned with flower beds and ornamental shrubs, gardens (mîî) are places of "great beauty" in which socio-ecological relations are forged in the creative processes of shared selfhood. By taking a "multispecies" (Ingold 2013; Tsing 2015) approach to gardening, I will show how - for the Makushi - "beauty" is a value that emerges not from solely from human considerations, but, rather, in the interaction between humans and other kinds of beings (animal, plant, spirit). This requires an analysis of vernacular concepts of growth, maturation, and diversity - notions which are themselves rooted in mythic history and ethno-theories of life. I employ an ecosemiotic approach to cross-species relations (Kohn 2013), in order to illustrate how Makushi engagements with the dazzlingly diverse world of the garden are made sense of in semiotic terms - that is, via the idiom of signs and representation.