{"title":"A Philosophy of Stories Plants Tell","authors":"Michael Marder","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.a903844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.a903844","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Plants are habitually viewed as mute living beings, existing without the possibility of self-expression. In this essay, I suggest that plants not only silently tell us something (indeed, a great deal) about themselves and the world, but also that they tell stories, rendering witness accounts about life and death, light and darkness, middles, beginnings, and ends. After correlating vegetal storytelling with the ancient muthos that survives the onslaught of logos, I concentrate on three levels of this storytelling: (1) the story of plant life; (2) stories of plant communities; and (3) stories of individual plants. Jointly, these three levels comprise the philosophy of stories plants tell.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"189 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43369323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plants as Inventors: Interrogating Human Exceptionalism within Narratives of Law and Vegetal Life","authors":"Laura A. Foster","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.a903846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.a903846","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Drawing upon decolonial feminist science studies and critical plant studies, this article posits plants as inventors to develop a vegetal feminist approach for understanding the human exceptionalism that is central to conventional narratives of patent law and vegetal life. This critical analysis of the Hoodia gordonii case examines the anthropocentric assumptions of patent law, interrogates colonial legacies that obscure notions of plants as sentient beings, and imagines new ways of understanding and acting responsively toward plants. The resulting thought experiment ultimately rejects the position that there is only one legitimate way to invent, create, and produce knowledge about the world.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"226 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43258563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"I Dream of Seeing the Steppe Again: Plant Stories in the Context of Russia's War on Ukraine","authors":"Darya Tsymbalyuk","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.a903847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.a903847","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article questions how we can tell stories about/with plants: what are the limitations and possibilities of making stories inclusive of plants? Focusing on Russia's war on Ukraine, it also questions how stories about/with plants impact our understanding of the invasion of Ukraine, and of the experiences of its more-than-human inhabitants during the war. Finally, the author reflects on her practice of sharing stories through research, drawing, and participatory formats, with the example of a story about Kreidova Flora nature reserve located in Donetsk oblast, Ukraine.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"246 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43654214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narrative Trees: Arboreal Storytelling and What It Means for Reading","authors":"S. Nitzke","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.a903845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.a903845","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Interest in \"new\" tree narratives is rising, both in science and beyond. This calls into question what \"story\" and \"narrative\" mean in different contexts, whose story is told by whom, and how these stories are related to their material base. By comparing how dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet's Tree Story (2020) and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think (2013) relate to trees and storytelling respectively, this paper aims to explore the theoretical prerequisites for \"the stories trees tell\" and the ways in which trees are empowered and instrumentalized by narrative means to tell (not only) their own story.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"206 - 225"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45821071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Stories are seeds. We need to learn how to sow other stories about plants.\"","authors":"Natasha Myers, Frederike Middelhoff, Arnika Peselmann","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.a903848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.a903848","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this interview, Natasha Myers discusses her understanding of plants and the relational stories they tell. As a scholar, activist, and artist based in Toronto, Canada, Myers proposes ways to detune Western norms and forms of sense-making, to expand our sensorium, and participate with plants in the stories they tell. Calling out the colonial violence, racial injustice, and neo-Darwinism that are lurking within the stories people still tell about plants, Myers invites us to explore ways of sensing plants that can cultivate human-plant kinship, and open us up to an experience of the creativity of plant life.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"266 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45840978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Stories Plants Tell: An Introduction to Vegetal Narrative Cultures","authors":"Frederike Middelhoff, Arnika Peselmann","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.a903843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.a903843","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Our introduction aims to contest narrative as an anthropocentric proper and delineates current theories, methods, and challenges of conceiving plants as both storytellers and storied matter. Our issue fits into the larger frame of a recent \"vegetal turn\" within the humanities that has long been used to find plants marginal, mute, or symbolic supplements to human stories. The introduction, therefore, focuses on forms of vegetal creativity and narrativity. It explores vegetal narrative cultures emerging when (1) plants co-author and shape narrative practices, (2) plant stories partake in the creation of multispecies societies, and (3) plant articulations are embedded in narrative contexts.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"175 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49437357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Devil Is in the Cellar: The Genealogy of an American Thanksgiving Narrative","authors":"S. Gencarella","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay investigates the historical adaptation of a narrative whose primary image is an animal mistaken for the devil. This critical genealogy charts the narrative’s development from a 1648 pamphlet in England to an 1824 newspaper in Salem, Massachusetts, where it transformed into a tale concerning the New England Thanksgiving tradition. It then considers subsequent permutations and variants of that tale as they relate to the rise of a national holiday, only to be supplanted by narratives concerningthe Pilgrims in the late 1800s. It further demonstrates the utility of increasingly accessible newspaper archives for historical research into folk narratives.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"61 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66360180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Lion, the Spider, and the Laid-Off Janitor: Tales from the World Intellectual Property Organization","authors":"Áki Guðni Karlsson","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article illustrates how narratives work in an international policymaking setting during meetings of an intergovernmental committee of the World Intellectual Property Organization. Here stories, both narrated and cited, are used to negotiate a convention on the uses of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. These stories circulate in both informal talk and formal interventions during meetings, to support different positions, make a particular point, or explain certain aspects of the setting to novices. Well-known stories, some of which were initially formulated by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists, are instrumentalized in the negotiating process. Anecdotes, parables, and legends arise within the process andget passed from veteran attendees to newcomers. Through these stories, people hailing from the four corners of the world are temporarily transformed into a tentative and tenuous community that makes one of the great halls of international relationsits home for one week, thus laying the groundwork for multilateral diplomacy.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"107 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43734440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bava Gor and the Myth of Makhan Devi (Butter Goddess)","authors":"Karan Singh","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Siddis are a microscopic community of African Indians who are part of multiple migrations stretching over several centuries in India from numerous locations inthe East and North Africa. The myth of Bava Gor and Makhan Devi hides within it multiple contestations and adaptations in the religio-cultural landscape of Siddis through an encounter with native Hindu/Aboriginal religious beliefs. The paper seeksto study these transitions in the mythic landscape of Bava Gor and how it reflects the syncretic dynamics of Siddis’ relation with majority communities. For it, I propose to foreground interrelations between gender, ethnic, and religious identities and how these identities get transmuted through transferences between socio-political and religious spheres.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"108 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44928227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Middle Eastern Tales in Icelandic Tradition","authors":"Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article surveys translations of two Middle Eastern collections of tales, The Thousand and One Nights and The Thousand and One Days, into Icelandic. It demonstrates how both story collections were translated and repeatedly copied. Tales originating from the collections also circulated in Icelandic oral tradition when the recording of folktales began in the nineteenth century and were thus recorded along with others. Shedding light on story-telling tradition in Iceland at a time when national characteristics were being emphasized, the article demonstrates that Icelandic narrative culture was extremely varied and international.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"151 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48064484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}