‘Plant piety’ in question La « piété végétale » en question

As modern lifestyles increasingly include practices and knowledge about flora, humanities and social sciences are exploring the roles that plants play in our social landscapes (Wandersee and Schussler, 1999). Benefiting from a growing interest in the public sphere as well as in research, plants, flowers and trees are thus going beyond the field of competence of specialised sciences and are opening the way to new perspectives of problematising the dynamics of our world. This new interest is also coupled, in several disciplines, with a new look at the plant kingdom. Many authors consider that the latter possess skills and abilities that were previously denied to them.

Wohlleben’s (2017, 2019a, 2019b) recent trilogy has been a huge hit with the general public, associating trees with ‘societies’, highlighting their ability to communicate with each other, to feel pain and to be highly inventive in the face of the challenges they face at all latitudes. Their root system is said to function as a plant network based on the sharing of nutrients and information. The circulation of the latter occurs at three levels: through the root system, through host organisms (such as moss and fungi) and through the secretion of hormones. In this respect, this forestry engineer refers to a secret and still largely unknown life of ‘nature’. His thesis attests to a transversal concern for plants and an effort to get them out of the rut in which they were long confined. More recently, the biologist Hallé (2014, 2018), among others, has pointed out the extreme resilience of plants thanks to a totally decentralised cellular system. Despite their lack of vital organs, a neural system and means of communication, plants are said to be able to influence the behaviour of animals, transmit information (Pelt, 1996), memorise (Thellier, 2015) and interact with their environment. Concern for our devastating relationship with the world has thus fomented the emergence of theses which, next to the ‘autonomy of the living’ (Amzallag, 2003), support the sociality and psychology of plants. These works attest to a new consideration (even a fascination) for a kingdom that has long been neglected. On the side of the humanities, the important Anglo-Saxon literature attests to the fact that plants and trees have become real philosophical subjects (Miller, 2002; Hall, 2011; Marder, 2013, 2014, 2016; Marder and Irigaray, 2016; Nealon, 2015; Coccia, 2016: 73). Furthermore, Coccia (2016: 73) notes that philosophy – especially metaphysics – and theology have long produced a great deal of work on breath and breathing, and that pneumatology has taken note of the fact that the world is breath before all else, that ‘to live is first to breathe’. For the author, the full extent of the fact that plants, as the ‘first breath of the universe’, have constituted the condition of possibility of all existing things, in a world that was first of all a ‘plant fact’, has not yet been taken into account. He thus denounces the discretion of flora in scientific and philosophical descriptions, and calls for greater consideration: ‘We hardly speak of them and their names escape us. Philosophy has always neglected them, more with contempt than with distraction’ (Coccia, 2016: 15).

Alongside this work, new practices have emerged, such as sylvotherapy, as well as new ideas, such as the belief in the capacity of trees and plants to take revenge for the destructive actions of humans. In 2019, a magnificent exhibition at the Fondation Cartier entitled ‘We Trees’ gave trees a place as subjects – not objects – by highlighting another way of making the world and making community (Fondation Cartier, 2019).

However, while all this research and initiative is innovative in that it gives plants a new status – both politically and ontologically – this is only partially true. The discretion of the plant kingdom in literature is indeed quite relative, if one thinks of writers such as Condillac (Bertrand, 2020), Goethe in his Essay on the metamorphosis of plants (1790) or De Gubernatis in his Mythology of plants (1882). These texts show that plants were taken seriously very early on. Moreover, from the middle of the 20th century onwards, many anthropologists devoted whole sections of their monographs to plants. We can mention, for example, the research of Lévi-Strauss (1962), or that of Barrau and Haudricourt, both agronomists and anthropologists. To limit ourselves to a few Eurasian regions, we can also mention the pioneering work of Gourou on rice in the ‘civilisation of plants’ (1948), of Conklin (1954) on the botanical knowledge of the Hanunoo of the Philippines, and of J. Goody on the role of flowers in human cultures (1994). More recently, and still in an anthropological perspective, the work of Rival (1998), Hecht et al. (2014) and Bloch (2021) has made a major contribution to the problematisation of the social life of trees in different cultural contexts.

But if the interest in plants is not new, the perspective that grants them social and cognitive capacities seems more novel, at least in our latitudes. After an animal turn – and perhaps before a mineral turn – we have been witnessing for some years now a real infatuation with plants, which seems to relay (in some respects only) the concern to bring non-humans into human affairs, and to show the aporias of a discernment that drastically separates the City from the beings that surround it (Latour, 1991; Ingold, 2000). This interest in non-humans is based on at least two related phenomena. On the one hand, it is part of an awareness of the deep entanglement that links humans to the diversity of existing beings. In a context where science and society must reinvent themselves in order to face major challenges, new epistemologies are emerging with the aim of understanding environments in a more integrated way. After the environment and nature, it is vast symbioses that are being uncovered (Hustak and Myers, 2012), systems of signs (Kohn, 2013) and complex interconnections (Haraway, 2015). On the other hand, under the combined effect of innovative work in biology and philosophical reflection developed by specialists in so-called ‘multispecies anthropology’, the roles played by plants in the perpetuation of ecosystems and in interspecific cooperation processes are beginning to be documented. The focus is on the skills they possess in terms of communication and resilience, as well as their own forms of affectivity and ‘intelligence’ (Backster, 2014; Van Calewaert, 2018; Mancuso and Viola, 2018; Daugey, 2018; Hallé, 2018; Mancuso, 2019; Tassin, 2020b).

At the same time, biologists and foresters are showing that plants are not the passive beings they have long been thought to be. Able to transmit and emit stimuli by chemical means, certain plants are described as having learning capacities and as actors in particularly elaborate symbioses. They are said to be at the heart of complex interactions with multiple micro-organisms (Zaremski and Ducousso, 2017). In New Zealand, an apparently dead strain of kaori (Agathis australis) was able to produce callus tissue by sucking the sap from surrounding trees. This root symbiosis shows that a dead tree, without leaves or branches, continues to ‘live’. This brings into question the very definition of the notion of a tree ⁴ . Other research highlights the resilience of plants. Following dendrochronological studies, researchers have identified particularly old trees, such as Bristlecone pines that are more than 5,000 years old or spice trees (Picea abis) that are almost 9,500 years old. In Utah, a colony of trembling aspens is thought to be 80,000 years old, while in Australia, a small colony of Wollemi pines (Wollemia nobilis), discovered in 1994, is thought to be from a species more than 200 million years old (Rouhan and Muller, 2020).

Under the impetus of these discoveries, the very way of understanding the plant kingdom is being shaken up. Servigne and Chapelle – in L’entraide, l’autre loi de la jungle (2017) – are, for example, shaking up theories about the principles of survival in living organisms, replacing competition as a fundamental mechanism with interspecific cooperation. Beyond the multiplicity of species, fungi, mosses and lichens appear to be the masters of association, sharing and connections. They should, in the eyes of researchers interested in them, inspire humans to better resist and live together (Zonca, 2021), to found a new politics of living things. In this respect, biomimicry is a witness to the growing fascination with flora. This approach to living things can lead to a real ontological shift, a paradigm shift in which plants (among other forms of life) are set up as models for thinking about a healthier inclusion of humans in the world. The premise that partly underpins these approaches is that, after 3.8 billion years of evolution, plants – including algae – have developed ‘bioinspired’ adaptation strategies that can ‘solve human problems’ (Benyus, 1997).

Based on prodigious advances in the understanding of the complexity of the plant kingdom, it is nonetheless notable that these approaches to talking about flora often resort to terminologies that refer directly to the cognitive dimensions of human sociability. Jacques Tassin, a researcher in ecology, did not hesitate to entitle one of his books ‘Thinking like a tree’ (Tassin, 2020b), in order to suggest the merits of an ecology of the sensitive (Tassin, 2020a: 181). He advocates a change of approach from the Aristotelian perspective and that of the Judeo-Christian traditions, which have made the plant a ‘sub-animal’ (Tassin, 2016: 13). In the same vein, scholars such as Hartigan and Seccombe offer seminars entitled ‘How to interview a plant?’, ⁵ while others question the vegetation thinking (Holdredge, 2013; Tassin, 2016) and knowledge (Hallé, 1999; Beerling, 2007; Chamovitz, 2012). In the absence of articulated language and proven reflexive consciousness in these beings (Hiernaux, 2020: 85), the question arises whether these approaches are able to capture the complexity of the plant kingdom without reducing its specificities.

Clearly the methodological and epistemological questions are challenging (Myers, 2015; Gibson and Willis, 2018; Gibson, 2018) and remain unsatisfactorily answered. Ethically – and as with humans – what is the point of reporting on societies from which one does not come? This is the question raised by Leblanc and Roustan (2017) in their review of animal studies. One might add: is there not a real risk here of usurping points of view, as if humans could, without consequence, substitute themselves for plants and claim to understand them? Beyond a (re-) enchantment of the world, what do these interpretations bring to our imaginations, can we really claim to ‘Be an oak’ (Tillon 2021)? How can we read these works, how can we verify them, how can we see them criticized? Multi-species perspectives successfully point to entanglements and the sensitivity of the plant (Van der Veen, 2014; Archambault, 2016), but the moralistic and utopian tone of many stimulating contributions runs the risk of sacrificing some rigour for the sake of a surplus of affect. In particular, the call for an ‘animistic’ or ‘amniotic ecology’ that would assume the continuity of the living seems to us inclined to leave in the shadows an important part of the dynamics of our world: the way in which, in an extraordinarily diversified way, human collectives have constructed singular places for themselves in environments, including in animistic universes.

All these works nevertheless open up new avenues for the anthropology of human-plant relationships (Haraway, 2015; Tsing, 2017; Schulthies, 2019; Hartigan, 2019a). While new concepts are emerging – Schulthies, for example, speaks of ‘plant piety’ (2019), in an issue of Anthropology Today devoted to the ‘ethnography of plants’ (Hartigan, 2019b) – new epistemological lines are contributing to renewing our approaches to ecosystems. In this context, new questions are emerging. Do trees have a ‘secret life’ (Tudge, 2012; Wohlleben, 2017)? How can we give them a voice (Stone and Larrère, 2017)? And at a time of ecological disaster, how can we make them our allies (Martin, 2019)? In the same vein, the Federal Ethics Commission on Biotechnology (2008) asks: can we still exclude plants from the moral community? This is the theme we wanted to address in this issue, in ethnographic contexts where it does not appear as a recent discovery, but as the product of various interactions with the environment: what about ‘plant piety’?

Before introducing the contributions in this issue, we would like to raise a final question: is this new vigour in the interest in flora and its agency as recent as it seems? A brief historical digression may allow us to see a resurgence, rather than a novelty. In his book Man and the natural world. Changing attitudes in England (1500–1800), historian Keith Thomas shows that by the beginning of the 18th century, at a time when forest areas were shrinking significantly in England, the tree had achieved a status equivalent to that of a pet. Its beauty was praised, artists painted portraits of it and it was claimed that cutting it down was a bad omen. The historian points out that even earlier, trees had a protective function and forests were associated with sacred spaces. It was later that sensitivities gradually changed:

Part of this feeling might almost be called religious. The English no longer worshipped sacred groves, for early Christian missionaries had always been hostile to so-called ‘holy’ trees; and in the eleventh century the Church had made it an offence to build a sanctuary around a tree. Yet green branches were carried in procession on May Day or at Midsummer. (Thomas, 1983: 422).

In the 18th century, the forest became a place of intimacy and meditation. Parishes were supposed to be home to sacred oaks and some trunks even gained international fame. Trees were thought to provide a link to eternity. They were sometimes presented as heroes: they were associated with great names in the history of the country and mobilised in metaphors to refer to them. The forestry vocabulary also drew on terminology specific to the social identification of humans: ‘A fruitful cross was called “a wife”; one without seeds was a “maiden” or “widow”. A young shoot of felled coppice was an “imp” (a kid), and a tree too old to yield useful timber a “dotard” (an old fool)’ (Thomas, 1983: 424). Trees were treated as humans, and these treatments closely followed the evolution of those used in child-rearing. In some gardening books, while arborists rebelled against the idea of ‘mutilating’ trees by cutting them down, some wrote that these victims ‘suffer pain when cut down’, and that they express this. Borrowing from the vocabulary of verbal communication is of course not insignificant, since it reflects an intentional and emotional apprehension of trees:

And in fruit-growing areas it was common to wassail trees by singing, firing guns and offering libations. ‘Men must learn to discourse with fruit trees, having learned to understand their language,’ thought Ralph Austen, a leading seventeenth-century authority on the subject. In 1653 Margaret Cavendish published a dialogue in which an oak complains to the woodman of being tortured: ‘You do peel my bark, and flay my skin, chop off my limbs.’ When an oak was felled, reported John Aubrey, it gave ‘a kind of shriek or groan that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting’. (Thomas, 1983: 425. We emphasise in italics)

These details are instructive because the sensitivity attributed to trees in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the midst of the emergence of the modern era, perhaps prefigures a certain contemporary anthropomorphism. With the scientism of the 19th century, these conceptions were perpetuated by certain authors – Boscowitz (1867) entitled one of his books The Soul of the Plant - before fading away and reappearing a little later, including in the human and social sciences.

Like the new fascination with plants, the journey into our past proposed by Thomas justifies the undertaking of this issue. By resorting to the notion of ‘plant piety’, we wanted to highlight this apprehension of plants from the sensitive faculties that are recognised to them, within the present-day Intelligentsia, but also in the historical depth of certain Western practices and, above all, in cultural contexts where it is anchored in ordinary modes of apprehension of the living, and is articulated with perennial institutions. Would Bloch (2021) be right to see, following S. Carey, cognitive reasons for the construction of a symbolism of plants in terms of their vitality?

It should be noted that since the 1950s and 1960s, the links between plants and witchcraft, curative and/or ritual practices have been the subject of an abundant anthropological literature. Brosse (1989) and his mythography of trees – represented as ‘manifestations of the presence of gods on earth’ – are an example, as is the work of Pelt (2008) who has long promoted a ‘spiritualist ecology’, or the recent book of Bonjean and Vermander (2021) on rituals around cereals. Research on imaginaries (Harrison 1992) and on shamanic contexts – such as Castaneda’s (1968) famous work on ‘devil’s grass’ – are also fields where this relationship between plants and non-humans is illustrated. Other authors had previously laid down important milestones with greater rigour. This is the case, for example, with the work of the philosopher Arber (1950), the work of the biologist Corner (1964), and countless references in ethnobotany (Dieterlen, 1952; Fox, 1952; Conklin, 1954; Lieutaghi, 1983; Ford, 1985) and, more generally, in ethnoscience (Bahuchet, 2018).

In terms of ‘spiritualities’, plants were first problematised on the basis of entheogens (Baud and Ghasarian, 2013). As such, the psychotropic properties attributed to plants and trees – like the medicinal virtues that ethnobotany has been documenting for a long time – have long been known (Hsu, 2010). However, they are far from exhausting the types of agentivity attributed to plants. As markers of space – even in regions such as the Colombian Guajira, which are notable for their desert landscapes and sparse shrubby vegetation cover (Simon, 2020b: 279–289) – vegetation supports the distinction between places inhabited by humans and those occupied by spirits. In many regions, it is through large trees that ancestrality is expressed and it is around them that many ritual practices are concentrated (Laugrand et al., 2020). In New Caledonia, the landscape is historicised, toponymised and animated by the Waapwi columnar pines which, planted by the Kanak, indicate sacred and taboo places, recall major clan events, locate ritual places. They mark out the territory or, through their association with the mounds, retrace the migratory paths of the clans as ‘memorial spatial markers of genealogy’ (Byl, 2017). Here and there, they appear as real interlocutors or are mobilised as effective agents, which allow the good intentions of humans to be manifested towards non-humans: the dead, master spirits or others (Simon, 2020a, 2021). It is not possible to make an inventory of the roles attributed to plants in this text, as they are so diverse. In these varied cultural contexts, these appear as witnesses of broader understandings, which concern the types of possible interaction with living things.

Admittedly, these have been partially overshadowed by the prominence of ‘animate beings’ – particularly large, farmed animals, prey and predators (Wandersee, Schussler, 1999; Laugrand and Oosten, 2014) – with whom relationships appear more plausible. Viveiros de Castro expresses this idea about Amerindian ontologies: ‘(. . .) the spiritualization of plants, meteorological phenomena or artefacts seems to [be] secondary or derivative in comparison with the spiritualization of animals’ (Viveiros de Castro, 1998: 472). Undoubtedly neglected in favour of animality, flora has also remained largely confined to ethnoscientific approaches aimed at classifying, isolating and identifying the essence of living matter, while the relational dimensions that characterise the inscription of beings within complex environments have remained in the shadows. In his books Les mots et les choses (1966) and L’archéologie du savoir (1969), Foucault criticised this classical episteme of taxonomic representation of the living, which, through the continuity it applies to nature, has generated its domination and separation from culture. In this regard, should not the systems of classification of existing things, but also of ethnic art objects museographed under the influence of naturalism, ‘abandon a blindingly classificatory logic in favour of an enlightening associative approach’ (Byl, 2021: 33)? In many indigenous contexts, non-humans are subjects of ordinary interactions that occupy the humanities with increasing interest (Descola, 2005; Laugrand, Simon, 2020). The role of deities, spirits, the dead and other non-human figures should not be underestimated here, with plants to be thought of in relation to all these entities.

The example of the baobab tree among the Serer of Senegal is exemplary, as these trees constitute a whole with the deceased placed at the foot of the trunks (Louvel, 2014). From this point of view, the notion of cosmology or socio-cosmic system seems preferable to that of ‘sacred ecology’ now used by specialists (Berkes, 2008; Laugrand and Laugrand, 2020). In any case, the articulation between collectives and their surroundings takes on particularly varied contours, which encourage forms of relationship ranging from predation to cooperation. It therefore remains to continue and develop the work of documenting the roles played by plants in different ethnographic contexts (modern and non-modern), the uses they allow or encourage, the knowledge and know-how they are the object of, and the ‘attachments’ (Brunois, 2002) they support.

This is the task that the present issue sets itself. It echoes in a way an issue recently published by the journal Anthropologie et Sociétés, edited by Laplante and Brunois (2020). Brunois (2020). Entitled ‘Devenir-plante’, this thematic dossier aimed to study the power of action of the plant in its entanglements, attachments, and even becomings with humans (Houle and Querrien, 2012; Laplante, 2017a, 2017b; Archambault, 2016). This issue, however, proposes a shift. Borrowing the term ‘plant piety’ proposed by Schulthies (2019), this issue intends to raise the interest of decentering the way we look at the plant kingdom, and of taking note of the major advances in its current problematization. It is a question of raising the relevance of the ways in which, in different contexts, plants are made to play major roles in the acquisition of conditions of existence, by soliciting them as agents, interlocutors or intermediaries. Piety, as we understand it, denotes both a disposition of mind and a type of engagement in a relationship. It also presupposes the intervention of a third part: a god, a spirit, an ancestor, an institution, a Book or any other totalizing referent, such as certain meanings of the words ‘Earth’ or ‘Nature’. In this respect, the project of this issue is to question the multiple articulations that flora allows, by highlighting the properties that are attributed to it, as well as the interactions that they make plausible. By mobilising a resolutely ethnographic perspective, we propose to return to the close links that certain societies establish between plants and social institutions, by focusing on substances and relationships. In order to better grasp the range of roles that the plant kingdom occupies in different contexts, this issue focuses on diversity, and brings together contributions that document the omnipresence of flora in sensitive everyday life, as well as in ritual and spiritual worlds. Due to space constraints, the focus is on the Indo-Pacific and its shores, but other case studies would be desirable.

Such an ambition also takes over from another volume, published in 2020: ‘What do animals and plants know, predict and transmit...?’ (Laugrand, Simon, 2020). It can be justified in two ways. The first, which we have only outlined, consists of taking note of the recent literature that gives plants a major role in the future of societies. Proposing to adopt a moderate stance, this issue takes note of a literature announcing a ‘plant turn’. This is characterised by the multiplication of books and articles devoted to forests, plants and the ‘intelligence of plants’ (Daugey, 2018). The second path is ethnographic. In order to contribute to this undertaking, the authors propose texts that exemplify the types of relationships that populations have with plants, based on several ethnographic anchors.

First, Benoit Vermander examines the case of cereals and their modes of existence in Taiwan, in particular how certain cereals have become sacramental. He describes cereal images and practices, consumption patterns, religious representations and contemporary spiritualities, highlighting the symbolic ‘hybridization’ of cereals and their remodeling in a globalized religious imaginary. Denis Monnerie analyses the yam and the ‘mahogany nut’ in the ritual and ceremonial practices of the Kanaks of New Caledonia, where the annual yam premise ceremony is attested in most societies. He focuses on the Arama society, in the far north of the country. This society is distinguished by the fact that a small ceremony is held a few weeks before the yam ceremony and involves the fruit of an uncultivated tree, the ‘mahogany nut’. In Taiwan, Pi-chen Liu describes the rituals associated with various plants, particularly ginger, rice, millet, among the Pangcah/Ami people following their annual cycle. She examines ritual prohibitions and categories, but also the role of ancestors, deities, shamans and diviners. Else Demeulenaere and her team are studying the Serianthes tree, whose interspecific relationships are followed through the study of rituals and oral histories in Micronesia. The tree, now endangered, plays a major role in indigenous cosmologies and ethnoecological knowledge, particularly in the islands of Palau and Yap. Much further north, Sveta Yamin-Pasternak mobilises rich ethnographic material collected among the Chukchi, Yup’iit and Inupiat of Alaska to analyse the role of plants in the traditions of these Arctic peoples. The knowledge is measured in terms of ethnobotany, food practices, and the use of substances for spiritual purposes, and in particular to maintain relations with the invisible world of the spirits. Attention is also paid to ritual injunctions and offerings. Finally, Laura Rival generously comments on these contributions and relates them to other work done in other parts of the world. The interest of these reflections is twofold. On the one hand, it lies partly in the very precise entry point chosen each time (rice, millet, etc.), with the plant then being analysed in its multiple relationships to the rest of the living world. On the other hand, the contributions all follow relationships with spirits, without ever speaking of ‘plant piety’, preferring to emphasise once again the different relationships that the peoples of the Indo-Pacific establish with these entities.

In short, while in the West, plants appear more and more as spiritualised or humanised actors, and whose role and place must be urgently assessed on the threshold of a predicted planetary ecological disaster, elsewhere, where trees and plants have long been considered as living beings, sometimes as people and partners, it is rather intersubjective relationships and modes of existence that are marked. Plants also play the role of mediators, linking humans to their cosmos. We are convinced that in order to pursue the anthropology of plants, it will be necessary to give even more consideration to the knowledge of indigenous peoples, who are otherwise ‘scientific’ and do not express the need to re-enchant a world with which they have always maintained close intersubjective relations.