Multilayered Qualities of Relating to Endemic Pili Trees Among Smallholder Agroforestry Farmers in the Philippines

Abstract

Mutual care relationships between humans and nonhumans, where humans cede control and care for collective rather than individual good, are understood as more ethical and sustainable ways of being. (Re)cultivating such relationships more broadly requires understanding them, including the diversity of relationship types and emotions embedded within them. Limited previous research suggests a spectrum of qualities of relating in human–nonhuman care collectives from killing to tending, with little attention having been placed in previous scholarship on the role of affect in these relationships. In this study, we draw from interviews with smallholder farmers in the Bicol region of the Philippines to test a typology of human–nonhuman relationship types and to describe associated emotions that emerge between famers and the culturally and economically significant endemic pili tree (Canarium ovatum). We find that smallholder farmers’ relationships to their pili trees are multilayered, and align, at times, with a “caring-for” pili orientation and at other times with a “mutual care” quality of relating. While both types of relating were intimately tied to the livelihood significance of pili, mutual care was more associated with positive emotions. The livelihood value of an increasingly commercialized plant and as well as the plants’ lifeway itself influence human ways of relating with it, and emotions both emerge from and motivate particular types of care for this tree. These findings help to illuminate the intricacy and multidimensionality of human–plant relationships and suggest emotions as potential markers and/or pathways to particular ways of relating.