Description
Book SynopsisPlants Matter explores how plants and people live together. This is not only a book about the importance of plants and how people use them, but it argues also that knowing the world is achieved-with plants. In addition to populating the landscape, plants alter human physiology in multiple material ways, through gatherings or through sensorial conversations using the chemistry of taste, perfume, colour, sound and textures. The chapters gathered in this volume offer a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that use ethnographic and ethnobotanical information to explore how the behaviours and capacities of certain plants around the world have enticed, excited and even seduced people to pay attention.
Table of ContentsList of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Contributors Preface 1 Introduction: Talking of (and with) (the Materiality of) Plants Luci Attala and Louise Steel 2 The Materiality of Plants: Plant–People Entanglements Marijke Van der Veen 3 Plants as Medicine in the Anthropocene Sarah E. Edwards 4 The World Tree: Humans, Trees and Creation on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Falk Parra Witte 5 Composing with Plants: Discerning their Call Julie Laplante and Kañaa 6 The Matter of Knowing Plant Medicine as Ecology: From Vegetal Philosophy and Plant Science to Tea Tasting in the Anthropocene Guy Waddell 7 Escaping to the Garden and Tasting Life Sarah Page 8 ‘The crop that ruled our lives’: Memories of Tobacco among Former Growers in Australia Andrew Russell Index
