Embodying Biodiversity

Terese V. Gagnon is an environmental and political anthropologist. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the co-editor of Moveable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory.

“Embodying Biodiversity is a moving exaltation and eye-opening homage to everyday practices of sensuous conservation, undertaken by plants and people who are bound by intimate and affective relations of care, knowledge, and nourishment, and that persist in the face of racial colonial capitalism. The volume’s granular attention to bodily engagements, emergent sovereignties, and rooted co-becomings offers a vital counterpoint to the paralyzing politics of despair so often generated in Anthropocenic times. In highlighting possibilities for harmonious human-vegetal flourishings across space and generations, Embodying Biodiversity artfully and sensitively opens our senses to the hopes harbored by biocultural refuges that are shared across kin and kind.”—Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua  “As this new collection of beautifully crafted essays show, ordinary people everywhere play a fundamental role in keeping biocultural diversity alive. Anchored in loving memories, their daily sensuous engagements with plants, animals, crops, and foods may not sound that impressive. Yet, their ‘biophilia’ has a power of its own, perhaps precisely because it thrives in the shadows of grand theories, official pronouncements, and institutionalized policy processes. The authors of Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty follow in the footsteps of talented ethnographer, writer, and scientist Virginia Nazarea to show us how ethnography makes the very small or apparently insignificant visible.”—Laura Rival, author of Huaorani Transformations in Twenty-First-Century Ecuador: Treks into the Future of Time