Abstract

Bunkley (2022) defines interembodiment as “the sharing of embodied experiences across and among biological bodies.” As an environmental anthropologist thinking in terms of more-than-human relationality, I take this up to ask: what about other kinds of bodies, beyond human ones?

Using a political ecology framework, this contribution draws on long-term ethnographic research with olive growers in Sicily, Italy, to consider more-than-human, and especially human-plant, relationality, care, and wellbeing. I argue that plants are sentient kin in what I term Sicilian oliviculturalists' “praxis of care”.

Praxis of care refers to participants' articulation of a theory, and its actionable practice, of love, affection, and respect for the beings and landscapes with which they make a living. This praxis of care engenders interembodied relational wellbeing sited in people, plants, landscapes, and livelihoods.

I argue that Bunkley's concept of interembodiment is a provocation not only to blur the edges of discrete physical human bodies, but also to re-imagine the responsibilities and pleasures that derive from the relationships humans have with other-than-human bodies.