Vegecultures and the social-biological transformations of plants and people

Abstract

The social entanglements of vegetative reproduction are considered for three neighbouring tropical regions that are often considered to exhibit very different histories of plant exploitation during the Holocene: early and independent agricultural development on New Guinea; introduction of agriculture to Island Southeast Asia during the last 3000-4000 years; and, Australia as the 'hunter-gatherer' continent. Following recent reassessments that emphasise the commonalities of many plant exploitation practices across these three regions, the focus here is upon the shared vegetative disposition, or orientation, of people to plants. The intention is to provide insight on how people's awareness of the vegetative reproductive capacity of plants has been mutually constitutive for the production and reproduction of their social worlds, whether by groups ordinarily referred to as 'hunter-gatherer' or 'horticulturalist'.