Author: Olivia Angé & Susannah Chapman
Dates: March 2026
Venue: Cultural Anthropology – Theorizing the Contemporary Series
Link to the publication: www.culanth.org

The concept of care has become central to work on multispecies relations (Münster et al 2021). Yet “care” is so broad in meaning that it is often used indiscriminately to describe interspecies interactions across very different relational contexts. The literature on human-plant relations has shown care to be multivalent. It may be practiced as a task much like raising children (Angé 2024; Strathern 2017), but it may also entail standardization, control, and culling in pursuit of agricultural “scalability” (Tsing 2012; Chao 2018). Caring for plants is thus a world-making practice recognizable in farmers’ fields, home gardens, and seed-saving networks (Dow 2022; Nazarea 2005) as well as different imperial, capitalist, and nationalist undertakings (Chacko 2019; Chapman 2018). What does it mean to care for vegetal life when care is enacted across such disparate relational contexts? What orientations to more-than-human life might descriptions of care, in their broad conceptual reach, conceal? This series reflects on the multiplicities of plant care by attending to questions of vegetal "responsability," considered as ‘the capability to respond’. Approached this way, “responsability” may index relations of responsibility in the human stewardship of plants, but it may also foregrounds interspecies response–or the cultivation of the possibility for dialogic connection between plants and their human companions. Here we take inspiration from Donna Haraway, who describes making space for response as crucial for respectful interspecies relationality (2008). Contributions to this series explore vegetal responsabilities and the different ‘caring’ relations they subtend, from respect and endearment to standardization and abandonment, to theorize human-plant relating across various agricultural worlds. Reflecting on the politics of vegetal care, we consider how attention to plant-human responsabilities, their intersections, and their divergences offers possibilities for relating otherwise in this era of ecological destruction and conservationist zeal.

Contributors

• Stewardship and the Difficulty of Shared Responsibility — Joeva Sean Rock
• Disease Management and Technical Regimes of Care in a Potato Genebank — Helen Anne Curry
• Eating one’s seeds: care and loss in the Mixe highlands — Gabriel G. Roman
• A Technicity of Care: Yams as Co-actors in “Abelam” Cultivation (Papua New Guinea) — Ludovic Coupaye
• Politics of Tuberous Regards in Andean Practices of Agricultural Care — Olivia Angé
• Muted meadows; choreographies of abandonment and recovery in the Nordic Arctic — Marianne Elisabeth Lien & Janike Kampevold Larsen
• After Care: On How Frozen Seeds Animate Climate Futures — Can Dalyan
• Ultracross Collards and Unsettled Practices of Plant Care - Eva Rose Steinberg
• Refusal from the seed room floor — Christian Keeve
• A caring predation: The loving perils of plants among the Kuikuro (Amazonia, Brazil) — Carlos Fausto
• Vegetal response-ability on a plantation frontier — Sophie Chao, University of Sydney
• Responsable Rice and the Silent Voices of Life — Susannah Chapman
• A Vegetal Apathy for an Asymptotic Taxonomy — Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez
• Thinking with minorities: ancient weeds and storytelling — Verónica S. Lema