[Linganth] CFP - Power/Plants: Phytocommunicative Transformations of Authority

[Swinehart, Karl]

Colleagues,

We have room for an additional paper on a panel on plant-human sociality. Find the draft of the panel abstract below. If you have a paper that might go well here, please contact:

karl.swinehart at louisville.edu

Thank you!

Karl Swinehart


Power/Plants:  Phytocommunicative Transformations of Authority

This panel examines cases of plant-people relations within competing regimes of authority. The status of knowledge about the cultivation and consumption of plants, or phytocommunicability (Schulthies 2019, 2020), often concerns diverging claims of legal, religious, and scientific authorities. Traversing and negotiating rifts across what different communities deem alternately legal/illegal, obligatory/forbidden, sacred/profane, these conflicts take on varied forms and scales, for example: The cultivation of cannabis, coca, opium and other plants deemed alternately illegal narcotic or valued medicine has been a focus of often violent state/community conflicts across the globe. Access to the plant life of forests and parks may be foraging or theft, gardening or land invasion, depending on differing frameworks for plants, property, and the public. Both assertions of intellectual property within the commodification of plant derivatives by pharmaceutical companies and the expansion of monoculture agribusiness have set private large commercial interests at odds with community relationships to plants and the biomes that sustain them. This panel also considers how plants come to do more than mediate, but also intervene in these affairs. This panel also scrutinizes the roles anthropology, linguistics, and other human sciences have played within such disputes. Within linguistics, for example, as horticultural and botanical knowledge lexicalized within Indigenous languages refer also to threated biomes and even ones that have disappeared (Muehlmann 2013), how have plant-human relations figured into language reclamation projects? When the discipline of anthropology has engaged in phytocommunicative acts, how have these aligned with, extended or, alternately, restricted or even erased, other sources of phytocommunicative authority?

Muehlman, Shaylih. 2013. Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta. Durham: Duke University Press.

Schulthies, Becky. 2019. "Partitioning, Phytocomunicability, and Pieties," Anthropology Today 35(2): 8-12.

Schulthies, Becky. 2020. "Phytocommunicability and Cross-Species Sociality," Ethnos 86(1): 1-8.


Karl Swinehart
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Comparative Humanities
University of Louisville
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