Tami Spry, Professor Emeritus,
Minnesota, USA

The Natureculture Body: Making Radical Botanical Kin

When I am struggling with hope or feeling not-myself, seeing my garden and sitting with plant beings offers a kinship where humility and vulnerability create a space of openness, of growth, of curiosity, a collaborative copresence, a “power-with” plant beings.  We are inescapably of nature; we are plant, soil, water, air.  “It is not an overstatement,” notes Natacha Meyers, “to say that we are only because they are” (124). For the well-being of material being(s) we might consider manifesting “kincentric ecologies” (Salmon), a Raramuri based praxis that understand flora, fauna, and human materialities as inextricably woven together as kin for health and survival, where no hierarchy exists in the material world.  The natureculture body offers a praxis where becoming sympoietic with the natural world “can disassemble and reassemble us” (Meeker and Szabari 6) for purposes of hope and growth.  We will seek this method of making material being(s) in our work here at 8th European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.

Meeker, Natania and Antonia Szabari. (2019) Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction.

Fordam University press.

Meyers, Natasha. (2021) How to grow livable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the

Planthropocene. Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Religion and Ethics. Opinion. Posted Wed 6 Jan 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548

Salmon, Enrique. (2000). Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature

Relationship. Ecological Applications, 10(5), 2000, 1327-1332.

Speaker Biography

Tami Spry is an Emeritus Professor of Performance Studies. She continues to write and perform living in the high desert of California.

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