Full Description
The Indigenous Canela inhabit a vibrant multispecies community of nearly 3,000 people and over 300 types of cultivated and wild plants living together in MaranhÃo State in the Brazilian Cerrado (savannah), a biome threatened with deforestation and climate change. In the face of these environmental threats, Canela women and men work to maintain riverbank and forest gardens and care for their growing crops, whom they consider to be, literally, children. This nurturing, loving relationship between people and plants-which offers a thought-provoking model for supporting multispecies survival and well-being throughout the world-is the focus of Plant Kin.
Theresa L. Miller shows how kinship develops between Canela people and plants through intimate, multi-sensory, and embodied relationships. Using an approach she calls "sensory ethnobotany," Miller explores the Canela bio-sociocultural life-world, including Canela landscape aesthetics, ethnobotanical classification, mythical storytelling, historical and modern-day gardening practices, transmission of ecological knowledge through an education of affection for plant kin, shamanic engagements with plant friends and lovers, and myriad other human-nonhuman experiences. This multispecies ethnography reveals the transformations of Canela human-environment and human-plant engagements over the past two centuries and envisions possible futures for this Indigenous multispecies community as it reckons with the rapid environmental and climatic changes facing the Brazilian Cerrado as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Toward a Sensory Ethnobotany in the Anthropocene
Approaching People and Plants in the Anthropocene
Approaching Sensory Ethnobotany
Introducing the Canela People
Introducing the Plant Kin
Following the Pathways of This Book
1. Tracing Indigenous Landscape Aesthetics in the Changing Cerrado
Tracing a Canela Aesthetics of Land
Understanding the Canela Bio-Sociocultural Life-World
Understanding the Changing Cerrado
Approaching the Canela Territorial Landscape
Becoming Resilient: Living with and Valuing the Land
2. Loving Gardens: Human-Environment Engagements in Past and Present--
Understanding Indigenous Landscape Transformations
Gardening: A Brief History, 1814-Present
Loving Forest and Riverbank Gardens in the Twenty-First Century
Learning from Star-Woman: Origins of Horticulture and Biodiversity Maintenance
Gardening as Resistance
3. Educating Affection: Becoming Gardener Parents
Parenting Plants: Skills, Practice, Process
Learning, Knowing, and Feeling with Plants
Understanding Gendered Multispecies Bodies
Caretaking of Plant Children: The Experts
Becoming Strong, Becoming Happy, Becoming Well
Making and Growing with Plant Kin
4. Naming Plant Children: Ethnobotanical Classification as Childcare
Categorizing Plants: Sensory Pleasures
Noticing, Naming, Sorting, and Saving
Expanding Multispecies Families
Writing: Plant Childcare in the Twenty-First Century
Multispecies Loving, Open Taxonomies, and Living Lists
5. Becoming a Shaman with Plants: Friendship, Seduction, and Mediating Danger
Talking with Plants
Becoming a Shaman: Engagements with Nonhumans
Shamanic Caring
Shamanic Mediating: Dangers in the Gardens
Becoming Friends to Plants in Canela Scalar Animism
Conclusion: Exploring Futures for People and Plants in the Twenty-First Century
Advocating for Sensory Ethnobotany in Multispecies Futures
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendices
Appendix A: Living Lists of Canela Cultivated Crops
Appendix B: Living Lists of Canela Native Plants in Savannah, Chapada, and Riverbank
Appendix C: Star-Woman (CaxÊtikwỳj) Mythic Story
Notes
References
Index
