The ‘Edibility Approach’: Using Edibility to Explore Relationships, Plant Agency and the Porosity of Species’ Boundaries

This paper introduces the Edibility Approach, which proposes that the condi-tion of ‘being edible’ is a mechanism that some plants employ to influence their in-gesters to care for them. In light of correspondences between interdisciplinary repre-sentations of plants’ abilities to communicate across species, this paper demonstrates how, rather than passive entities, plants actively use their edibility to forge relation-ships with other beings. Using an interdisciplinary and ethnographic framework that foregrounds the ways that plants influence human bodies specifically, the Edibility Approach encourages consideration of the corollary processes that occur during and succeeding digestion from a relational perspective. Interrogation of the social effects of eating plants and the part plants play in inciting behaviours as if from ‘the inside’ of bodies moves away from the notion that plants are resources and towards understand-ing that they are active influencers. This offers a much needed alternative direction to the study of plant/human-animal relationships. Therefore, this phyto-centric framing offers a new botanical ontology and conceptual tool to explore dependencies between species. In addition, by using a morethanhuman, multi-species framework that rejects reductionist methods in favour of the relational, the Edibility Approach effectively problematizes the category/species boundaries that both establish and characterize the differences between plant and animal. In so doing it offers a timely contribution to the scholarship that hopes to offer novel methods of understanding planetary relationships in the Anthropocene

Plastic, Waste, Environment

Discussions concerning the socio-environmental harms and the inadequacies of effectively recycling plastics are now well rehearsed. These issues are counterbalanced by plastic’s enormous versatility and low production costs. To enable plastic to remain a useful material its inability to degrade needs to be addressed. Current practice almost forces consumers to purchase non-recyclable containers if they want to benefit from the contents. Governments should support moves away from recycling towards biodegradable with regards plastic containers. The following is a summary of the perspectives of approximately 80 young people studying Anthropology at undergraduate level with regards plastic consumption and consumer choice. The information results from 3 years of informal qualitative data collection. This document first describes the courses and then culminates with the students’ suggestions for the future that arose from their research. It also demonstrates the apprehensions young people have towards plastic bottles, cups and other non-biodegradable containers

'Better Stop Chatting and Get Back to Work': Knowing One's Place and Hot Desks in Non-Clinical Areas of the NHS

Workplaces are designed with work in mind. According to Weeks (2011), places of work are spaces of command, obedience, and obligation that make relations of power and authority tangible. This article considers the experience of moving from tethered to open-plan hot-desk offices by exploring the difference between what hotdesks signal and what they do. Using the example of hot-desks in a non-clinical National Health Service (NHS) setting in Britain, it demonstrates how employees resist the homogeneity and equality implied by hotdesks and hold tightly to how they imagine their work identities should perform within a hierarchical habitus of work (Bourdieu 1977). Thus, it shows that workers need work to reproduce the naturalised notions of what work is thought to be, and when challenged to adoptalternative methods use moralising arguments and subtle acts of resistance (Foucault 1991; Scott 1992) to perpetuate and redeploy hierarchies. Consequently, the fundamental and dominant values and methods associated with how and where to work are exposed as comfortable through familiarity, and, therefore, despite irritations people not only want to know their place but also want that place to sit within a landscape that uses the conventional rules of the 'game' of work (Frayne 2015)

Zhigoneshi: A Culture of Connection

Zhigoneshi describes the symbiotic dependencies that weave together to produce the world. The Kogi concept of mutuality, as expressed in their word zhigoneshi, conveys a picture of life as a series of collaborative, cooperative relationships, which the Kogi understand as axiomatic to all living processes, including human societies. This is evident in relation to their vertical mountain economy and in their view of exchange. Consequently, for the Kogi, materials, knowledge and thought are not simply connected but are also fundamentally entwined. This approach does not simply describe ecological dependencies; it also holds that economic and biological life existentially inform each other and therefore cannot be separated, even in thought. Chiming with the reality of cellular symbiotic practices at the very origins of life (as articulated by Margulis), zhigoneshi rejects the notion of the self-interested in pursuit of accumulation and profit, as employed by capitalist economic methods, in favor of actions that understand connectivity and ensure balance and harmony are maintained. Using numerous cultural examples, we illustrate how many alternative ideas of economy continue to inform current exchange practices out from the market and suggest that these examples provide a useful understanding of post-capitalist possibilities in the Anthropocene

Digesting ‘Cryptid’ Snakes: A Phenomenological Approach to the Mythic and Cosmogenetic Properties of Serpent Hallucinations’

Serpentine cryptids are to be found in stories throughout the world, invariably representing a provocative, mysterious and powerful mixture of wisdom and danger. This chapter explores the ubiquitous persistence of snakes in human stories and pays specific attention to how existential knowledge is obtained through digestive relationships with specific cryptozoological serpents. Using the ethnographic example of the consumption of Ayahuasca – a hallucinogenic decoction drunk commonly because of the hallucinations of wisdom-imparting snakes it generates - this paper reviews the ‘liminality’ that snakes tend to exemplify by illustrating the correspondences between the inner mythopoetics concerning snakes, the corporeality of snake-ness (in the form of snakes encountered during hallucinogen-induced visions) and the messages snakes present for assimilation. In association with the phenomenological emotionality snakes inspire, I suggest that the feeling-sense of snakes pervades human cultures because it works to facilitate the incorporation of internal non-verbal areas of conflict that might otherwise remain repressed or unexpressed and that this is commonly represented by associating snakes with food, eating, knowledge and the human body

‘I am Apple’: relationships of the flesh. Exploring the corporeal entanglements of eating plants in the Amazon

This chapter uses a New Materialities (hereafter NM) approach to think about the corporeal consequences of eating plants. The aim is to encourage the reader to recognize the many active and formative material entanglements that articulate our lives. Typically positioned as an activity that is primarily self-interested and instinctual, eating is redefined here as a mutually influential co-productive relationship that is, in part, driven and shaped by the capacities of the engaging materials as they meld together through digestion. The title of this chapter playfully pokes at the paper ‘I eat an apple’ by Mol (2008) that focused its attentions on the ‘I’ (or the human view) of eating. This is done with a view to draw discussions away from attending exclusively to the eater in a bid to remind ourselves that eating is a process of becoming-with what is eaten. Therefore, using digestion as the process and the stomach as the location where edible substances blend, this approach recognizes not only the fundamental materiality of the body but also that the bodies of eaters materially bind with the bodies they ingest. Any notion that you are anything other than what you incorporate as flesh should fall away. Adopting this perspective attends to the accuracy of representation and is therefore a political move. The global North – due to the Enlightenment foundation of its knowledge base – tends to imagine the world as something comprised of discrete bounded entities. This chapter challenges an epistemology of separation to demonstrate the world is one of blending and networks (Capra and Luisi 2014)

Mind the Gap:Exploring the gap between harmony and the watery materiality of climate change(s) in rural Kenya

This chapter considers the influence water (as a hyperobject) has on climate change. Drawing particularly on my experience with the Giriama in Kenya, I demonstrate the inherent complications of finding balance or harmony when perspectives on the material world dramatically diverge

Bodies of water: Exploring water flows in rural Kenya

This chapter coheres the foci of the more-than-human (cf. Whatmore 2002) and New Materialities (Cr. Barad 2003, 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010) moves together so as to highlight the co-productive and agential role water plays in shaping the lives and bodies of a small group of Giriama subsistence farmers in rural Kenya. This community, increasingly troubled by creeping desertification and the accompanying poor harvests that it brings, have been obliged to seek water at great distances on a daily basis. This brute reality and the exclusive reliance on environmental waters has altered since the successfully construction of a sweet-water well financed by a group of UK-based development agencies. This chapter interrogates the problems of disregarding the profoundly entangled corporeal and ecological continuum that flows between water and bodies generally (Cf. Bennett 2010), and, using this framing, considers the material abilities of water and bodies during areas and times of water scarcity to engage and demonstrate how fluidity and movement supports their mutuality. Therefore, rather than considering water simply as a resource for human use, I am choosing to establish water as a subject that, through its physical abilities and material behaviours, not only shapes cultural ontologies but also through ingestion viscerally upholds, mobilises and sustains bodies