Abstract

DURAND, Leticia. Vegetal ethnography On the world we built in collaboration with plants. Alteridades [online]. 2022, vol.32, n.64, pp.111-123.  Epub Feb 20, 2023. ISSN 2448-850X.  https://doi.org/10.24275/uam/izt/dcsh/alteridades/2022v32n64/durand.

The main goal of this paper is to describe vegetal ethnography, an area of study interested in observing plants as beings with agency. Based on a literature review, the theoretical proposal, the main concepts, and some relevant works and authors are presented. Among the results, it is found that the reworking of the notion of agency offers anthropology new opportunities to explore how plants are embedded in social life entanglements. Although vegetal ethnography’s methods are still being developed and there is debate about the limits and possibilities of the tools employed, these new perspectives make it feasible to access other ways of understanding the world, different from those that modernity has established. It is concluded that recognizing the capabilities of plants is a way of questioning human exceptionalism and imagining futures based on collaboration and interdependence.

Keywords : multispecies ethnography; vegetal agency; Anthropocene; ontological turn; non human.