Congratulations to Diana Gibson and William Ellis for their special issue of Anthropology Southern Africa, “Human and plant interfaces: relationality, knowledge and practices.”
Congratulations also to our postgraduate students Hameedah Parker, Tihana Nathen and Michelle Pasquallie who published in this special issue.
“In 2016, a group of academics — including anthropologists, phytochemists, rangeland ecologists, conservationists, legal experts, pharmacognosists, botanists (of various types), physiologists, and varied specialists in natural medicine, environmental humanities and political ecology — gathered to discuss plants from a variety of perspectives at the “INSPIRE 2016 Green Medicine Symposium” that was run under the theme of “Interfaces: Sciences, Humans and Plants.” This was an attempt to search for some common language and insights into ways to investigate human-plant interfaces.
[…] The papers present a variety of plants, herders, Rastafarians, elderly people, bossiesdokters [bush doctors], kruiekenners [people knowledgeable about plants], botanists, a phytochemist, nursing staff and traditional healers. It is our opinion that the discipline of anthropology is the one field that is able to draw together all these seemingly disparate terrains of knowledge under one thematic umbrella. […] This special issue draws together papers which scrutinise the interfaces between humans and plants from a variety of perspectives and in the process endeavours to “see” plants anew and to open up a space for thinking through theoretical, ethnographic and methodological issues that our engagements and entanglements with plants evoked.” Read more
