Introduction to Special Collection: Plant-Anthropo-Genesis: The Co-Production of Plant–People Lifeworlds

Introduction

Plant-anthropo-genesis indexes the ways in which plants and people bring each other into being in particular environments and political economies by way of their affordances. Affordances, a concept proposed by environmental psychologist James J. Gibson (1979), point to the capacities or attributes that shape plant–human assemblages. These present the opportunities, or the hindrances, that organisms—plant, animal, and human—encounter in attending to their environments (Ingold 2018, 2022; Keane 2018; Oele 2020). Nally and Kearns (2020) offer a compelling account of the potato and its affordances, noting that its hardiness and caloric density have presented vulnerabilities as well as adaptive opportunities, shaping its role in both making and resisting empires. Considering, for instance, the contrasting climate affordances of tropical crops such as sugar and pineapple and temperate-climate crops such as wine grapes and berries, captures the interrelated agencies of plants and their human interlocutors as they have traveled together through trade and colonial expansion, and as they accommodate one another, whether in historical or contemporary plantation economies or on small-scale farms and gardens (Bastos and Heath 2024).

This special issue emerges out of a complex combination of intellectual labor spanning multiple conferences, meetings, and years. It arose from a series of intersecting conversations surrounding anthropology's “plant turn,” catalyzed by encounters at a series of conferences, live and virtual, just before and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the “Planthroposcene Palaver” roundtable that Deborah Heath and Natasha Myers organized for the 2019 American Anthropology Association (AAAs), Deborah and Cristiana Bastos refreshed their shared interest in plant–people assemblages, drawing on Deborah's work on regenerative viticulture (Heath 2023) and Cristiana's connected histories of plantation labor (Bastos 2023). Soon thereafter, Cristiana met Sita Venkateswar at the “Republic of Plants” conference in Chennai, India, drawing together Cristiana's work on how plants shape people through the plantation system and Sita's engagement with the re-emergence of ancient grains as commodities, sparking new conversations (Venkateswar 2017a; 2017b). This led to an extended conversation across three time zones– Portugal, U.S. Pacific Northwest, and New Zealand– during which Deborah proposed the term plant-anthropo-genesis that became the reference point and emblem of our shared interest in unmaking and remaking multispecies lifeworlds. In 2021, Andrew Flachs joined as a participant in our virtual “Plant-Anthropo-Genesis” AAA roundtable, and in the hybrid conference “Conviviality” that Sita co-organized. Noting ethnobiology's longstanding interest in these topics, Andrew proposed this journal as a productive space to bring this emerging discussion of the collective ideas around plant-anthropo-genesis to print. Andrew helped integrate this perspective with the ongoing work of ethnobiology in this venue.

The papers in this special issue take note of the affordances and practices through which plants and humans are co-produced in a range of political economic contexts, along with the affective or cultural logics (Archambault 2016; Hustak and Myers 2012) that link human and plant interlocutors. Our perspective resonates and aims to engage with ethnobiology's wide-ranging contributions to the study of plant–human assemblages. Ethnobiology has long recognized that human and plant relationships produce particular ways of living, and the discipline is increasingly asking how these lifeworlds reflect and create political possibilities from colonialism to abolition (McAlvay et al. 2021; Wolverton 2013). Underlying this approach is the assumption that ecological systems that contain humans are not acted upon by but made through sociopolitical forces. Special collections within the Journal of Ethnobiology have asked both how human–plant relations might allow us to take botanical ontology seriously as one of many coexisting realities (Daly et al. 2016), and how plant life makes its own way in post-industrial ruin (Bubandt and Tsing 2018). Such dynamics are, perhaps, even more salient in cultivated crop fields, in which plants and people clearly depend on each other to survive. While agricultural fields have been configured through historical contexts marked by terrible violence against human and nonhuman life as a result of colonialism, capitalism, enslavement, and other modes of subjugation (Davis et al. 2019; McKittrick 2013), they also have also been sites of repair, mutual aid, and caregiving (Jegathesan 2021; Keck and Flachs 2022). Myriad crises of climate, biodiversity, sovereignty, and language intersect alongside their solutions in these worlds because plants and people sustain and wither together in these co-created spaces. In this collection, we explore this contradiction through a combination of ethnographic, historical, and ecological analysis, asking how plant–human assemblages create possibilities for a range of living and dying.

Looking largely to the more damaging aspects of socioecological co-creation, environmental scientists proposed the term “Anthropocene” to denote how the last 150 years of a carbon-intensive economy have pushed the Earth out of the Holocene era (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007). Although some would place the Anthropocene in 1950, others would place it during the 19th-century industrialism or even much earlier in a series of Holocene domestication events. While this term has gained widespread approval and galvanized important recognition of anthropogenic pollution, this neat technological marker is a matter of contention among geologists and other physical scientists. It has also not marinated well with some social or ecological scientists. This concept is subject to much debate, not least because it focuses on a human degradation of a state of nature that does not account for the co-creation of plant-anthropo-genic landscapes. For starters, humans have been making planetary changes for thousands of years, not merely hundreds. Well documented by Indigenous knowledge-holders (Berkes 2012; Bonta et al. 2017; Hernandez 2022; Turner 2005), the dynamic relations between people, animals, and plants in coastal (Lepofsky et al. 2017), forest (Armstrong et al. 2021), plains (Mueller et al. 2021), and agrarian spaces (Mueller and Flachs 2022; Nazarea and Gagnon 2021) has created a range of conditions under which life can flourish with care. Archaeologists argue that humans have been changing the Earth through agriculture far earlier than the industrial era (Stephens et al. 2019), while a niche construction approach would argue that the coevolution between people and plants through domestication created new ecological conditions around the world as early as 10,000 years ago (Smith and Zeder 2013). In these cases, planetary change is not necessarily a call for alarm but a base condition of life.

What differentiates crisis from omnipresent change, then, are relations of power that govern life and the historical context of those power relations. Colonialism and capitalism provide hierarchical and extractive lenses through which to view which life as valuable, allowing us to contest who reaps that value. In addition to these questions of timing and novelty, scholars have criticized the Anthropocene as a concept that centers humanity as a uniform and apolitical force, rather than more specific critiques of inequality including capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchal violence, and plantation agriculture (Davis et al. 2019; Haraway 2015; Moore 2015; Wolford 2021). As environmental historian Jason Moore (2015) argues, the Anthropocene reinforces the idea that there exists a static “environment” that is acted upon by people. Those actions, ranging from local environmental degradation to climate change, then become a problem that humans need to fix. He calls this mainstream environmentalist view “green arithmetic:” nature  +  society  =  crisis. Upon ethnobiological examination, this equation quickly breaks down. First, there is ample evidence of human societies living with rich and biodiverse biocultural refugia whose major threat is not humans but rather state and corporate exploitation (Barthel, Crumley, and Svedin 2013; Nabhan et al. 2011). But even more to the point, social and ecological life are intertwined in measurable ways that destabilize this simple green arithmetic. The expansion of agriculture across Neolithic Europe and Africa created standing water conditions suitable for the spread of malaria, creating the conditions for some people to express sickle-cell alleles (O’Brien and Laland 2012), both changing and being changed by their dynamic environment. More recently, settler colonial warfare beginning in the 15th century reshaped environments in ways that also created networks of single-commodity-dependent economies and race-based enslavement (Mintz 1985; Moore 2010). On a much smaller scale, individual people can alter their own gut microbiomes by consuming fermented foods, which are themselves microbial environments modified for extreme acidity or salinity (David et al. 2014; Flachs and Orkin 2021). Cultivated plants, and the spaces where people grow them, provide a helpful lens to re-tangle social and ecological relations in productive ways.

Plant-Anthropo-Genesis and Ethnobiology

Our concept-method plant-anthropo-genesis takes inspiration from the generative relational perspective on multispecies engagements captured in Vinciane Despret's (2004) notion anthropo-zoo-genesis. She begins her discussion of this concept with an exegesis of a famous case in “becoming with” (Haraway 2008): Clever Hans, the counting horse of Berlin, who learned to perform his supposed mathematical feats by developing an intimate understanding of human gestures. Through this relationship and encounter, Despret calls attention to the ways that Hans provides a device to bridge thought, action, consciousness, and will. Far outside any kind of objective, anthropocentric experimental space where animal cognition could be understood as a “factish” existing apart from human conditions (Flachs 2019b; Latour 2010), horses and humans influence one another's thoughts and actions. Despret describes and deconstructs several such experiments with people, horses, monkeys, dogs, and rats to argue that the artificial objectivity of scientific observation is undermined by a deeper truth: species become quickly attuned to one another in ways and create and transform all involved.

Despret describes this transformation as an affective experience in the world. Against a reductive anthropomorphism, she argues that these species mutually construct one another through an affective exchange of emotions, actions, thoughts, and the skill to read these. Furthermore, as with Haraway's extensive scholarship (2003, 2008, 2015) in human–animal becomings, this emergent process of becoming is not merely an empathetic process where one species takes on attributes of the other. While anthropomorphizing adds new definitions of a human-centric life, anthropo-zoo-genesis adds new dimensions to a shared, mutually constructed relationship. In anthropology, scholars of human–animal connection have examined how humans forge relationships with caribou (Nadasdy 2007), cows (Adcock and Govindrajan 2019; Govindrajan 2018), baboons (Smuts 2001), macaques (Fuentes 2012), and salmon (Swanson 2019) to name just a few. In each case, the relationship between species is conceived as more than the sum of its parts: an anthropo-zoo-genesis rather than an anthropomorphizing or zoopomorphizing. Beyond animals, scholars have explored these moments of relational construction with microbes (Flachs and Orkin 2019; Jašarević 2015; Paxson 2013), evolutionary niches (Albuquerque et al. 2018; Smith 2011), keystone edible or medicinal plant species (Pieroni, Pawera, and Shah 2016; Turner 2005), and whole agricultural landscapes (Bray 1994; Carney 2002).

With this relational perspective, we invite readers of this special issue to join us in a shared conversation, since ethnobiology has taken the co-construction of environments as a base assumption of the discipline since at least the third phase (Hunn 2007; McAlvay et al. 2021; Wolverton 2013;). Increasingly, ethnobiologists are bringing political and economic context into this analysis in ways that lay bare the material and scholarly harms of extractive research while pointing to reparative and co-constructed models (Armstrong and Anderson 2020; Flachs et al. 2021; Vandebroek et al. 2020; Zent and Zent 2022). Ethnobiologists recognize virtually all landscapes as influenced by human activity, from forest (Armstrong et al. 2021) or desert (Nabhan et al. 1983) species diversity to centuries of climate change writ large (Stephens et al. 2019). As places where life is actively and regularly tended, gardens and farms should be places of special interest to scholars asking about plant-anthropo-genesis, the co-construction of life, in a historical, political, and socioeconomic context.

In spaces where seeds are saved or traded, gardens provide a landscape in which taste, heritage, or aesthetics create a biodiversity inseparable from that cultural heritage (Nazarea 2014). In this way, culturally-informed practices like seed saving enhance biodiversity. Creating such gardens sets in motion a chain of socioecological entanglements that each require attunement and develop into something more than the sum of their parts. Seeds require social networks of exchange in which other kinds of cultural exchange can occur (Calvet-Mir et al. 2012; Nazarea and Gagnon 2021). Furthermore, these spaces produce oases of care, taste, and memory important not necessarily because they are economically productive but because they encourage affective entanglements against plantations (Carney 2020; Jegathesan 2021) or transcend the limited offerings of capitalist food networks (Flachs 2022; Sovová, Jehlička, and Daněk 2021). Learning to live alongside plants’ developmental plasticity led humans to invite them into a domestication relationship that reshaped landscapes around the world (Mueller et al. 2023). In attuning ourselves to plants and learning to see how plants attune themselves to us, plant cultivation provides a structure for a larger lifeworld that encourages biodiversity and care.

Or, that is, plant cultivation for much of human history has provided a structure for a lifeworld in which biocultural diversity and care were possible. Following philosopher Jürgen Habermas (Fultner 2011), lifeworlds describe systems of integrated and managed meaning that exist alongside a larger political economy. Advanced industrial capitalism seeks to commodify the social world while states seek regulation, bureaucratization, and legibility of markets and populations, including those structurally disadvantaged by global capitalist relations between people and institutions. In doing so, states intervene directly in the system of norms and meaning that comprise the lifeworld, a process that Habermas calls internal colonization. So, a lifeworld of capitalist or imperial plant relations can also provide a structure for profound violence and extraction. Empires before the 15th century used plants as weapons of war as well as means of mutual exchange (Spengler 2019), although that reach was only indirectly global through climate systems (Stephens et al. 2019) or disease vectors (Bos et al. 2014).

Imperial crops such as sugar (Mintz 1985; Moore 2010; Reese 2023), tea (Besky 2021), or cotton (Beckert 2014; Flachs 2019a) along with the material and intellectual infrastructure that supported them (Mitchell 2002), reshaped relations between land, labor, species, and people. Through plantations, a socioecological invention designed to dehumanize enslaved and Indigenous people and extract value by severing relationships between people and plants, European imperial capitalism in the 15th and 16th centuries sought to profit from the violence of reducing life's complexity. Scholars of plantations link them to colonial-era (Besky 2021; Wolford 2021), contemporary (Chao 2022; Li and Semedi 2021), and lingering (McInnis 2019; McKittrick 2013) systems of control and hierarchy around which life is valuable or cheap (Moore 2015). Contemporary vast fields of maize (Wise 2019) or soybean (Hetherington 2020; Leguizamón 2020) build from this monocultural past to reshape not only land and labor but life at the specificity of DNA's genetic code itself. Where prior genetic changes in crops tended to be vested in communities of practice as part of a process of attunement between plants and people, plantations of genetically modified (GM) commercial plants serve to extract value for the multinational companies that own not only seeds but the associated agricultural chemicals (Mueller and Flachs 2022). Life persists on the edges and ruins of contemporary monocultures (Jegathesan 2021; Ofstehage 2021; Tsing 2015), a signal that relationships of care are difficult to stamp out completely.

The tenacity of life in the ruins is visible in the cascading webs of lifeforms that underpin the re-emergence of botanical life within devastated landscapes. In the aftermath of disasters, whether nuclear or toxic chemical, with their lingering calibrations of half-lives and afterlives, we are offered glimpses of co-constituted and co-evolving remediation, repair, and reciprocity in Kumaki's (2022) poignant elaboration of the “ecologics…the material, social, and moral ecologies” in Fukushima. The “toxic sensorium” invoked by Stein and Luna (2021) foregrounds the agrochemicals harnessed by smallholder cash croppers in Mozambique and Burkina Faso, as pragmatic quotidian options “anchored in the belief…that more chemicals equal higher yields and household incomes” (Stein and Luna 2021, 88); despite the serious associated risks in these contexts of “rising rates of acute poisoning, ecological devastation, and unknown effects of long-term exposures and residues.” A similar rationale is applied by the “regenerative farmers” in New Zealand, whose cocktail of glyphosate laced with fulvic acid and other humates facilitates no-till practices as a modality of “care” for the land (Venkateswar 2021). Care and harm thus take on many forms, both visible and invisible and sometimes lethal, with the concatenation of injuries extending across people and the convivial multitudes of plant and other lifeforms, above and below ground, all laboring to live, remediate, and repair even as they resist or succumb to enduring contaminants (Tam 2023).

Invoking Despret's (2004) notion of anthropo-zoo-genesis for the ways people and animals become attuned to and transform one another, plant-anthropo-genesis substantiates the “plant turn” extending beyond Lewis-Jones (2016). If the current moment of climate crisis, the so-called Anthropocene, originates not from fossil capital, but from the global disruption of biosocial life wrought by European imperial expansion, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the decimation of indigenous peoples by disease—the Plantationocene—imagining other possible futures may well benefit from embracing an aspirational Planthroposcene (Myers 2018). In focusing on cultivated plant contexts, this collection analyzes labor, ecological function, and the cultivation of environmental knowledge to ask how acts of plant tending, and the larger sociopolitical structures in which this tending occurs, make ecological transformations possible.

Papers in this Issue

In this special issue, we address entanglements between plants and people over time, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic and historical research to offer new and critical insights into the ways that plant–human lifeworlds co-produce one another from racializations in plantation societies to the aspirational interventions of gardeners, farmers, and scientists aiming for redemption from chemical industrial agriculture. Building from ethnobiology's interdisciplinary position, we combine insights from methods including ethnography, history, botany, the history of science, and ecology. The collection centers on acts of reciprocal human and botanical labor through a variety of contexts and perspectives in crop fields, including: how monocrops and plantations reshape socioecological life; ritual dimensions of plant–human interactions; and the regenerative alternatives that re-imagine plant–human relations and agro-ecological possibilities amid the historical weight of extractivist agriculture in plant-anthropo-worlds.

The first four articles explore these co-creations of human and botanical life to ask about plant-anthropo-genesis made possible through different crop systems. In the first two articles, Bastos and Macedo center the historical conditions of the plantation to ask what lives were made possible there. Plantationocene literature has been critiqued for decentering human relations and inadvertently downplaying hierarchies of human life that fuel them (Davis et al. 2019; McInnis 2019). These articles instead use plantations to focus on the uneven acts of co-creation between people, plants, and landscapes.

Bastos (2024) explores the notion of plant–people intimacies in settler Hawai’i by analyzing how some diasporic groups claim special bonds to plant species that intersect Hawai’i's plantationscapes and their own ancestral islands: sugar canes for Madeirans and pineapples for Azoreans. She follows those plants' trajectories in and out of Hawaii, Madeira, the Azores, and across the globe, transforming ecological, social, and cultural landscapes while becoming prized commodities, and examines how narratives of historical intimacy with plants help carve a symbolic niche in a settler society of contested positionalities.

Looking outside plantations to describe the subaltern relations made at their margins (Besky 2021; Carney 2020), Macedo's (2024) article explores the anti-monoculture relations created through cannabis (Cannabis sativa L.) as a meaningful plant providing healing, pleasure, and power in São Tomé. Drawing from historical accounts to read from colonial as well as Angolan perspectives, Macedo shows how plantation workers entered into multispecies alliances with cannabis at the margins of colonial knowledge and land management. Here, cannabis relations are a reminder of what can be gained when we take seriously the multispecies affective connections through which ecologies support the extractive affordances of plantation production, while sustaining counter-plantation alternatives.

Drawing more from contemporary ethnographic material, Flachs and Blickstein describe what kinds of life can live well in the shadow of GM crop monocultures. In the Argentine Chaco, Blickstein (forthcoming) describes how soy agribusiness displaces settler farmers grieving both the loss of plant relations and their former position of power. Settler farmers experience their own dispossession by GM soy farming through their memory of erstwhile racialized cotton plantations. Instead of embracing a multispecies resistance and solidarity, Blickstein's interlocutors grieve but do not contest the loss of soil, cotton seeds, and roses that provided multispecies connections linked to earlier extractive practices.

Looking to Telangana, India, Flachs (2023) asks how different kinds of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) agriculture offer a range of possible organizations of labor, ecology, aspirations, and reciprocity. While historically situated in plantation inequalities, the GM and organic cotton landscapes grown by smallholding farmers can also make unexpected room for other kinds of plant-anthropo-genesis through rituals and homegardens. Both GM and organic cotton farms are spaces where botanical relationships exist to promote diversities of plants, economies, and relationships. Telangana cotton plantation afterlives manifest in neoliberal individualism and toxic landscapes, and alternatives are sorely needed for people, plants, and places. Still, while organic agriculture encourages diversification in work, farm, and microbial landscapes, it also depends on foreign capital, careful monitoring, and long supply chains in its current form. These systems are complicated in that they present an array of variable futures to farmers and other living beings.

The final article explores this process of plant and social co-creation at the scale of landscapes and assemblages rather than through particular cropping systems.

While the other articles in this collection discuss plant-anthropo-genesis in rural spaces, Maurer (2023) takes this concept to New York City to explore how trees and people transcend a human-centric stewardship to reconfigure their relations to each other. In asking how trees and people relate to each other in the city, Maurer asks how each is transformed through caregiving practices that take mutualistic affordances into account, ranging from shade and beauty to water and protection. These acts make space for creative experimentation with nonhuman agency and more-than-human futures. Importantly, this relationship transcends the one-sided nature of civic stewardship proposed by city managers and allows instead for a lively and unruly multispecies world.

Conclusion

In attending to co-creation and care across time and space, this collection seeks to explore the kinds of ethnobiological futures that arise through the diverse forms of agricultural co-creation that we highlight through the concept of plant-anthropo-genesis. Within the long histories of plants used through empire and extraction, these articles show that there has also always been a path of resistance through other forms of caregiving, valuing, and organizing (Carney 2020; Jegathesan 2021; Keck and Flachs 2022)—at least for those willing to turn away from the power offered by plantations. While the orientation to take plants seriously as living and acting beings is familiar to many ethnobiological writers, we hope that plant-anthropo-genesis provides a helpful lens through which to view these complex co-creations whether they arise in the large-scale milieux of the plantation and its agro-industrial successors, or within the smaller-scale intimacies of farms, gardens, and city sidewalks. Rather than accept that plants managed in plantations, on small farms, or by city organizers are uncomplicated recipients of human attention, the articles presented here push ethnobiologists to ask what happens at these moments of multispecies engagement and co-production.