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Full Description
Roots of Power tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality.
In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet's tropics. These plants' deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants' social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes.
This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.
Contents
Chap 1 Introduction: Approaching the Boundary
Multi-sited ethnography
Political ecology
Ethnobotany
Institutions
Outline of the book
Chap 2 Beating the Bounds for Boundary Plants
Structure, territory, and tenure
From structure to process
Symbolic boundary processes
Monomarcation and polymarcation
The spatial turn
The plant and multispecies turns
The ontological turn
Re-turning to political economy
Conclusion
Chap 3 Tanzania: Knots of Peace on Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro as a social-ecological system
Living land tenure
Ancestors in the landscape
Knots of peace, order, and meaning
Conclusion
Chap 4 Cameroon: Bounded Vitality and Rank in the Oku Monarchy
Oku as a social-ecological system
Boundary plants and land tenure in Oku
Social organization and boundary plants on patrol
Masquerades, witchcraft, and life-force in Oku
Life flowing through boundary plants
Conclusion
Chap 5 Papua New Guinea: Embodying Places, Emplacing Bodies
The vegecultures of Oceania
Papua New Guinea as a social-ecological system
Cordyline as a botanica franca
Mapping social relations with boundary plants
Beauty, place, and order
Conclusion
Chap 6 French Polynesia: Rank and Revitalization in the Society Islands
Vegecultures and social ranking in Remote Oceania
The Society Islands as social-ecological systems
Boundary plants and monuments to hierarchy
The conjunctures of cordyline and colonialism
Revitalized boundaries in a new society
Decentralized protection and power
Conclusion
Chap 7 St Vincent: Dragons in a Postslavery Peasant Society
Boundary plants in the Plantationocene
St. Vincent as a social-ecological system
Boundary struggles in the provision grounds
The social organization of dragons
The red dragon is the guide
Conclusion
Chap 8 Conclusion: Beyond Boundaries
Methods revisited
Boundaries and routes of power in the past
Boundary plants and the roots of power today
Beyond the bounds
References
