Plants form the basis of life on earth and constitute the bulk of the visible biomass in the biosphere. Exploring cultural relationships with plants is therefore important for understanding the relationship between human cultures and the wider ecosystems and landscapes in which they live. In the “old animism” of Tylor and Frazer, the relationships between animistic cultures and the natural world were characterized as childish, savage and primitive, a stance which many of the chapters in the current volume explicitly reject. In this chapter I wish to complement this work by specifically reappraising similar characterizations of animistic interactions with the plant kingdom. I do so using more current anthropological evidence of human-plant relationships, as well as a substantial body of pioneering research in the plant sciences which demonstrates a remarkable convergence with indigenous animist knowledges of plant ontology. Such convergence prompts a discussion of animist-based models for a human-plant ethics – embedding our knowledge of plant behaviour into human behaviour towards them.

FROM SOUL TO WORSHIP

To the scholars of the “old animism”, the descriptions of animists' interactions with the plant kingdom were comprised of three parts: plants have souls, plants are worshipped, animist relationships with plants are primitive.