Accepted Panels

Environmental anthropology has consistently challenged and reconfigured the conceptual divisions between humanity and nature, engendering new understandings of human society in the process. Plants engage in elaborate forms of perception, interpreting and responding to their immediate environments and the other forms of life which they encounter in the course of daily life. Plants interact differently in relation to different species, like human beings, for sharing resources and coordinating actions. Rather than looking into plants only as a species for decor and background wallflowers, plants can be viewed from a different lens as ethnographic subjects because we modern subjects being human-centered undergo an inability to notice and ponder about plants. Hence, the boundaries of traditional ethnographic research conducted from an anthropocentric viewpoint now need to be pushed and directed “beyond the human” towards sessile plants which unequivocally possess parallel capacity for socializing and sensing. The theory of “affective ecologies” by Hustak and Myers encompassing plant, human and multispecies interaction demonstrates the interdependence and involution of seemingly unrelated life forms. Planthropology can help us to make allies with these green beings and also to document the affective ecologies taking shape between plants and people, so we can learn to listen to their demands for unpaved lands and for a time outside of the rhythms of capitalist extraction. This study highlights the intriguing possibilities and future perspectives of hemp cultivation and uses of hemp-derived products in Uttarakhand. To make allies with this intentionally disguised plant and to document the affective ecologies taking shape between hemp plants and people along with assemblages with multiple species, a plant-centered anthropological analysis of hemp is intended to be done by concerning hemp plants as the ethnographic subjects.