Plant knowledge: transfers, shaping and states in plant practices

Abstract

This exploratory paper interrogates the various ways in which knowledge about plants has historically been generated. It first examines how plant knowledge is located in and understood by traditional studies of plants, such as ethnobotany. It pushes at the accepted boundaries of plant studies where related concepts like anthropocene and planetary challenge the certainties felt in ethnobotanical and other plant studies. It thus contributes to a growing body of work that wants to examine the imponderabilia of plant life. Second, the paper questions the orthodoxies concerning knowledge transfer and suggests an alternate set of transfer lines. The paper shows that plant practitioners do not consider the acquisition and production of plant knowledge as simply an intellectual matter or one of mere curiosity but rather as requiring particular bodily and psychic states that enable access to deeper and hidden plant knowledge. These states are “known” to plants and they can choose to reveal them to plant practitioners or not. The paper closes with the argument that plant blindness holds the key to reading the magical properties of plants and, in part, suggests their occult and esoteric uses and agentivity.