Document Type
Journal Article
Publisher
Berghahn Books
Faculty
Faculty of Education and Arts
School
School of Communication and Arts / Centre for Research in Entertainment, Arts,Technology, Education and Communications
RAS ID
12723
Abstract
Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive, artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental studies, ethnobotany and economic botany, are undergirded by universalizing, sensorylimited visual structuring of the natural world. As the study of everyday embodied interactions of humans with flora, expanding upon the lens of cultural ecology, "cultural botany" provides a transdisciplinary research approach. Alternate embodied cultural engagements with flora emerge through a syncretic fusion of diverse methodologies.
DOI
10.3167/nc.2011.060202
Access Rights
free_to_read
Comments
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Nature and Culture. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Ryan, J. C. (2011). Cultural Botany: Toward a model of transdisciplinary, embodied, and poetic research into plants. Nature and Culture, 6(2), 123-148. This is a post–peer-review, precopyedited version of an article published in Nature and Culture. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [complete citation information] is available online here