Negotiating belonging: plants, people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds

Recent years have witnessed burgeoning interest in interspecies relations and multispecies ethnography. This review explores what such perspectives bring to long-standing anthropological attention to agrarian worlds. Considering why so much recent scholarship only minimally engages with longer disciplinary traditions found within ecological and environmental anthropology and ethnobotany, the review examines continuities and discontinuities across these different modes of attending to interspecies relationships. From here, it explores how contemporary scholarship renews anthropological attention to questions of domestication, relatedness, agency, and personhood and how it charts new ground by engaging theories of biopolitics, biocapital, biosemiotics, and plant ontologies. While noting that recent work has distinctive theoretical preoccupations, the review concludes by suggesting that fruitful possibilities lie in working with, and across, established and emergent anthropologies of the agrarian.

The social dimensions of invasive plants

Invasive plants pose a major environmental management issue. Research into the social dimensions of this issue has flourished over the past decade, as part of the critical examination of relations between human and nonhuman worlds. The social sciences and humanities have made substantial contributions to conceptualizing invasiveness and nativeness; understanding the perceptions, attitudes and values of diverse stakeholders; and analysing the politics and practices of invasive plant management. Cultural analysis allows areas of conflict and commonality to be identified. Social complexity must be added to ecological complexity to understand the causal relationships underlying invasions; and linear understandings of science-policy relationships are too simplistic. Productive connections have been established between recent social and natural science approaches in the context of rapid environmental change and unpredictable futures. Nonetheless, the prevalence of human exceptionalism in the ecological sciences constitutes a major point of divergence between social and natural science perspectives.