The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Placing Plants in Territory” comes from Volume 7 (2016), a special issue on people and plants edited by Kay E. Lewis-Jones. In their article, Sarah Besky and Jonathan Padwe use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a bulwark of social theory and an undertheorized category of social analysis. Through examples of how plants operate in different domains, they illustrate the analytical potential that a more-than-human approach to territories provides.
Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.
SARAH BESKY is Assistant Professor of anthropology and international and public affairs at Brown University. Her research sits at the intersection of environmental and economic anthropology. She examines the lives and labors behind tea production in India. Her publications include The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) and articles in Cultural Anthropology, Antipode, Anthropology of Work Review, and Agriculture and Human Values.
JONATHAN PADWE is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He researches life in landscapes of violence in the highlands of northeast Cambodia, where he works with Jarai swidden farmers to explore the ways that agro-ecologies encode historical memory and make the past material. Previously he worked with Aché foragers in Paraguay. His most recent publications include “Highlands of History: Indigenous Identity and Its Antecedents in Cambodia” (Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2013).