Phytocommunicability and Cross-Species Sociality

What vegetal modalities and botanic intertwinings situate cross-species communications and collectivities, and for whom? In much anthropological writing of previous eras, plants have served as a medium for analysing human sociality. Their ubiquitous presence and seemingly sessile silence, invisibility, anosmia and backgrounding have been one of the key posts of twentieth-century social and economic theory, despite the voices arguing for otherwise socialities. Recent work has moved plants to the fore to rethink our understandings of many core anthropological themes. This special issue adds to that work by foregrounding phytocommunicability, the ideologies about cross-species interaction shaping the kinds of work we do, observe, and make visible ethnographically.