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Distributed for University of Wales Press

Plants Matter

Exploring the Becomings of Plants and People

This book redefines plants as more than something to be consumed by humans.

Plants are often presented as resources for us to use. This book challenges that perspective by demonstrating other ways that plants matter. By turning away from the idea that humanity calls all the shots, this book reminds the reader that plants instrumentally influence and organize our lives by shaping choices and beliefs.
 

224 pages | 9 halftones | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2023

Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Earth Sciences: Environment


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Reviews

"This book puts plants back among people and shows that paying attention to the people-plant relationship opens new ground for understanding the plant-filled world we live in."

Jeremy Narby, co-author of Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge (2021)

"What if plants were people who sense, discover, remember and decide just as people do? Who communicate amongst themselves, whose kith and kin are spread about, rooted in relations of filiation and descent, who breathe the wind and thirst for water? If only we humans could attend to what plants have to teach us, how much we could learn! Read this book, and find out for yourself."

Tim Ingold, emeritus professor of social anthropology, University of Aberdeen

Table of Contents

List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Talking of (and with) (the materiality of) plants
Luci Attala and Louise Steel
Chapter 2: The materiality of plants: Plant–people entanglements
Marijke van der Veen
Chapter 3: Plants as medicine in the Anthropocene
Sarah E. Edwards
Chapter 4: The world tree: humans, trees and creation on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
Falk Parra Witte
Chapter 5: Composing with plants: Discerning their call
Julie Laplante and Kañaa
Chapter 6: The matter of knowing plant medicine as ecology: Changemaking in the Anthropocene
Guy Waddell
Chapter 7: Escaping to the garden and tasting life
Sarah Page
Chapter 8: ‘The crop that ruled our lives’: Memories of tobacco among former growers in Australia
Andrew Russell

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