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Title
Cultural Botany: Toward a Model of Transdisciplinary, Embodied, and Poetic Research into Plants
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008:
Author(s)
Publication Date
2011
Open Access
Yes
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 nature culture 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, sensory-limited 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.
Publication Type
Journal Article
Source of Publication
Nature and Culture, 6(2), p. 123-148
Publisher
Berghahn Books Inc
Place of Publication
United States of America
ISSN
1558-5468
1558-6073
File(s)
Peer Reviewed
Yes
HERDC Category Description
Peer Reviewed
Yes
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