PhD thesis by Aimee L. Trojnar, Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, 2024.
Reviewer: Virginia D. Nazarea (University of Georgia)
This dissertation consists of, in the author’s words, “granular” ethnographic studies of community gardens around Carbondale, Southern Illinois, through the lens of the theory of practice. More specifically, the author engages Tim Ingold’s notion of “enskillment” and occupying a place through increments in knowledge, sentiment, and experience. In seven chapters, she describes the perspectives and motivations of local gardeners who were participating in community gardens as they encountered and engaged with expanding multispecies worlds and embellished their own versions of ecological embeddedness and activism.
There is a lot of original contribution to be garnered here, from the anthropological and broader theories she marshals in relation to the study of human engagement with gardens to the rich, particularistic ethnography that brings out the personal histories and trajectories of the gardeners. Delving into local understandings and actions relating to “pollinators”, “weeds” and “compost”, she presents the multispecies complicities as “habitus” (defined, following Pierre Bourdieu, as the “durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisation” (11). Never stagnant, and rarely thwarted, the gardeners discarded and incorporated opportunistic and wily elements into their assemblages, what she describes as “the tangle of interacting species and other contributing components involved in vegetable gardening … along with the many changes that occur through multiple iterations of a garden” (18). There are no comparative tables here nor flow charts or easy generalizations, as the author highlights “the openness of the gardens to varied forms of connection and participation centered on gardening practices [that] allow them to cultivate a diverse network that depends less on shared ideology than many activist organizations do” (21).
The author had introduced her research by referring to the “plant blindness” that people growing up in modern contexts of mass production and ultra-processing tend to develop. Towards the end, she brings up this theme again as she conjures, following Sarah Elton, “the illusion of a world without limits: the seasonless supermarket, the food court, the all-you-can-eat buffet” (239). Gardens and gardening can be promoted as affective and effective antidotes to these cataracts of modernity as they foreground interdependencies, vulnerabilities, and co-temporalities. The author succeeds in detailing how “material engagement provides clues about how people cultivate connectedness—whether within a human community or an ecosystem—despite living in social conditions that often invite disconnection”.
