Introduction

Lewis‐Jones, Kay E.

doi:10.3167/ares.2016.070101

Cited by 31 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…But we know that before the huge influx of laborers in the 1870s, the island was already part of important transits of enslaved person from the ports of Luanda and Benguela in Angola since the late eighteenth century. “Cannabis sativa” was, “among many other precious drugs,” referenced in a publication as arriving at the island in 1826, without further information (Lima 1844, p. 10). It is reasonable to believe that the plant might have been brought earlier by one of the many thousands of enslaved men and women.…”

Section: Plantations Ecologies: Multispecies Worldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Macedo

2024

Journal of Ethnobiology

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São Tomé, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea and a former Portuguese colony, is an exemplary place to analyze the development of plantation “cropscapes.” These cropscapes emerged around sugar in the sixteenth century, evolved with coffee in the 1850s and consolidated with cocoa from the 1880s onwards. While is impossible to ignore the monocultural nature of São Tomé plantations and the centrality of specific plants for these plantation ecologies, there were other human/plant assemblages, that sustained, subverted or ran parallel to plantation goals of production, profit and power. This article zooms into cannabis to explore different relations between plantation working peoples and plantation environments, between suffering, healing, and violence, between labor, pleasure, and power. It will examine how cannabis was part and parcel of the lives of peoples from Angola recruited to São Tomé and, consequently, of the island's plantation worlds in the late nineteenth century. It will also discuss how colonial discourses on cannabis obscured and silenced the presence of this plant in contemporary plantation histories, regardless of its traces in the archive. Cannabis histories are in fact important ones: they counter imperial master narratives by showing how, even under conditions of exploitation, laboring communities and plants co-produced spaces of autonomy, care and leisure.

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Section: Plantations Ecologies: Multispecies Worldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Macedo

2024

Journal of Ethnobiology

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“…Plants also exert influence over social dimensions of human life, creating place and shaping relations (Lewis-Jones 2016). For example, the growth patterns of trees-columnar and arching-co-create urban atmospheres alongside human residents (Jones 2021), while plants whose growth is rapid and lateral and who thrive in disturbed conditions can intersect with human concerns about where particular species grow to create the "weed" (Doody et al 2014).…”

Section: Green Infrastructure Stewardship and Vegetal Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This scholarship focuses on the ways plants communicate (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieria 2017) and care for one another (Simard 2021), as well as their creation of, interference in, or indifference to the conditions of animal life (Ergas and York 2021). Plants also exert influence over social dimensions of human life, creating place and shaping relations (Lewis-Jones 2016). For example, the growth patterns of trees—columnar and arching—co-create urban atmospheres alongside human residents (Jones 2021), while plants whose growth is rapid and lateral and who thrive in disturbed conditions can intersect with human concerns about where particular species grow to create the “weed” (Doody et al 2014).…”

Section: Green Infrastructure Stewardship and Vegetal Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While such questions are significant, conversations have heretofore largely overlooked an important participant in green infrastructure and stewardship practices: plants. Frequently relegated to the background, recent scholarship reminds us that plants have agency in their own right (Lawrence 2021; Lewis-Jones 2016) and that cities are important sites of human-plant interaction and ethnobiological inquiry (Emery and Hurley 2016). Thus, I ask how a focus on the trees, and their effects on the humans charged with stewarding them, shift our interpretations of what is happening when people engage in the stewardship of trees as infrastructure.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Vegetal Agency in Street Tree Stewardship Practices: People-Plant Involutions Within Urban Green Infrastructure in New York City

Maurer

2023

Journal of Ethnobiology

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In cities nature is taking on a new role as infrastructure, providing essential services in terms of temperature regulation and water management, as well as the provision of habitat for biodiversity conservation. With this turn to green infrastructure have come new challenges to maintenance. Plants are lively things and if they are to perform their infrastructural roles they must be routinely tended to in particular ways. In the context of neoliberal governance, much of this labor falls to volunteer humans. Framed as stewardship, this volunteerism for plant-city thriving is posited as a way to meet maintenance needs while promoting human health and well-being and creating support for nature-based solutions through a sense of ownership and responsibility. While it is thus possible to read stewardship as an enrollment of people and plants into the reproduction of neoliberal urban political ecologies, in this paper I argue that such an analysis overlooks the involution of plants and people that occurs during acts of stewardship. Drawing on ethnographic research with street tree stewards in New York City I explore how vegetal agency draws people into affective, embodied relations. During acts of stewardship, trees act on people and reconfigure their relations in ways that potentially exceed the strictures of stewardship. Rather than allowing stewardship discourses and critiques thereof to be our sole frame for understanding these people-plant relations, we should also consider them from the perspective of vegetal agency and what human-tree involutions do within, around, and to human practices of stewardship.

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“…In academic circles, plants are having a slightly different moment. The “plant turn” of recent years has surfaced as an interdisciplinary position that sees plants as more than inert, passive objects subject to the whims of humans and of more charismatic animal life (Lewis‐Jones, 2016). Instead, scholars of the plant turn are centering plants as “communicative, sentient, and worldmaking actors” (Chao, 2022, p. 8).…”

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confidence: 99%

From objects of study to worldmaking beings: The history of botany at the corner of the plant turn

Gutierrez

2023

History Compass

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The “plant turn” of recent years has surfaced as an interdisciplinary position that sees plants as more than inert, passive objects subject to the whims of humans and of more charismatic animal life. Recent research in STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities, alongside scholarly publishing pursuits, have opened a field in which a small yet expanding community of scholars are proposing the worldmaking and agential capacities of plants. While the field of environmental history has already spent decades centering vegetal life and its profound impact on human societies, this essay considers what the plant turn might look like for the history of science and more specifically, the history of botany. What might it mean for plants to transform from objects of study to worldmaking beings in histories of the science? Drawing on two brief historical case studies from the Philippines, the essay invites consideration of plant worldmaking, understood in tandem with alternative ontologies, and of theorizing with plants. Though it may be much too soon to draw conclusions about what the plant turn may portend for the history of science (and the writing that may come from it), historians may have something to offer the plant turn—in discipline and method—in order to make this promising bed of scholarship rigorous and accessible.

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Introduction

Cited by 31 publications

References 33 publications

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Vegetal Agency in Street Tree Stewardship Practices: People-Plant Involutions Within Urban Green Infrastructure in New York City

From objects of study to worldmaking beings: The history of botany at the corner of the plant turn

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