Description

• Title:
  The Edibility Approach, Chemical Ecology and Relationality. Methodological and Ethnobotanical Contributions
• Creator:
  Kujawska, Monika;
  Kołodziejska, Iwa
• Contributor:
  Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Lodz;
  Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences;
  Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology;
  University of Warsaw; University of Warsaw Botanic Garden
• Description:
  This paper combines ethnographic and ethnobotanical fieldwork with the edibility approach (EA), chemical ecology and Ingold’s ontology of dwelling. The EA aims to “push harder onto and through the boundaries between edible plants and the human-animals that eat them to consider the outcomes produced as a result of these interacting materials” (Attala 2017, 130). This approach places ingestion in the light of multispecies entanglement. As proposed by Attala, this is still a philosophically “open” concept, of limited operational use in ethnographic (ethnobotanical) study. Our article argues for an expansion of the EA, based on this combined perspective and giving more attention to cross-species interactions placed in an environmental context. Our cases are about how people live with plants, exemplified by foraging practices of agriculturists in Ukraine, Daghestan and Argentina. The everyday social relations of our interlocutors are more-than-human interactions, and in these relations we pay a close attention to non-cultivated edible plants. We present two modes of writing ethnographies, in which we focus respectively on a single plant taxon or a group of plants, and where both people and plants are protagonists. We argue that incorporating the dwelling perspective and chemical ecology into the EA is one of the potentially fruitful approaches to the analysis of plant – people relations. The use of language and of the tools of ecology in an attempt to present different aspects of co-dwelling of people and plants, although it may seem anchored in Cartesian dualism, in fact allows for a deeper understanding of the relations among protagonists and their co-dwellers in the environment, and hence goes against dualisms. The relations and the ways through which organisms co-create their environment are the very essence of ecology. The close collaboration of anthropologists, ethnobotanists, ecologists and chemical ecologists is postulated in the article.;
  The article was written as a part of a project financed by the National Science Centre nr 2018/31/B/ HS3/03019. The research undertaken in Misiones, Argentina was conducted within two projects (nr 2018/31/B/HS3/03019; 2013/09/N/HS3/02226). The case study from Ukraine was supported by National Science Grant nr 2011/01/N/HS3/03332, and the case study from Daghestan was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation project: “Documenting Dargi Languages in Daghestan: Shiri and Sanzhi”. MK is grateful to the study participants for generously sharing their knowledge, and to Magdalena Zamorska and Miguel Alexiades for useful references. IK is deeply grateful to all the research participants (especially the protagonists of the cases presented) and to Iwona Kaliszewska for insightful comments on the Daghestani part of the article.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 ;
  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Międzynarodowe
• Date:
  2021.12.16;
  2020
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Wydawnictwo Instytut Archeologii i Etnologii PAN
• Relation:
  Ethnologia Polona;41
• Subject:
  relational anthropology;
  edibility approach;
  dwelling perspective;
  foraging;
  Ukraine;
  Daghestan;
  Atlantic Forest;
  Argentina
• Identifier:
  Kołodziejska, I., & Kujawska, M. (2020). The Edibility Approach, Chemical Ecology and Relationality. Methodological and Ethnobotanical Contributions . Ethnologia Polona, 41. https://doi.org/10.23858/ethp.2020.41.2009;
  0137-4079;
  http://hdl.handle.net/11089/40069 ;
  10.23858/ethp.2020.41.2009
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  seek permission
• Type:
  image