Hub Directors’, Dr Luci Attala and Professor Louise Steel, new book “Plants Matter: Exploring the becoming of Plants and People” is being featured on the Spring and Summer Catalogue of the University of Wales Press. Luci and Louise co-edit the series “Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology” of which this is the third book.

Plants Matter explores how plants and people live together. This is not only a book about the importance of plants and how people use them, but it argues also that knowing the world is achieved-with plants. In addition to populating the landscape, plants alter human physiology in multiple material ways, through gatherings or through sensorial conversations using the chemistry of taste, perfume, colour, sound and textures. The chapters gathered in this volume offer a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that use ethnographic and ethnobotanical information to explore how the behaviours and capacities of certain plants around the world have enticed, excited and even seduced people to pay attention.

Plants are often presented as resources for us to use. This study challenges that perspective by demonstrating other ways that plants matter. By turning away from ideas that imagine humanity calling all the shots, this book reminds the reader that plants instrumentally influence and organise our lives by shaping choices and beliefs.

Edited by Luci Attala and Louise Steel August 2023 • 216x138mm • 224pp HB ISBN: 9781837720484 £60 Available in e Series: Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology

Luci Attala is Senior lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the Director of the UNESCO BRIDGES UK Hub.

Louise Steel lectures in Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, specialising in archaeological theory and the Bronze Age in the East Mediterranean. She is the Assistant Director of UNESCO BRIDGES UK Hub.

 

Other books in this series: