Gathering

A Central Dichotomy

In her bestselling memoir Gathering Moss: Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003), Robin Wall Kimmerer aims to bridge the widening gap between scientific and Indigenous approaches to plants. To that end, Kimmerer draws both on her professional formation as a bryologist (i.e., a moss specialist) and on the Indigenous knowledge practices of the Potawatomi Nation, of which she is a member. Kimmerer’s book is indicative of larger trends in plant studies where the reevaluation of the vegetal goes hand in hand with a rethinking of plant disciplines and knowledge systems.

The contrary positions at stake here can be delineated via the verbs “gathering” and “collecting.” At first sight, these verbs are near-identical synonyms, designating the bringing together of things, thoughts, or words (and living beings, in the case of “gathering”[1]) in one place. While the two can be used interchangeably in some instances, their pairing marks an important divide in current plant studies, forming a central dichotomy, literally a “cutting apart” or a successive bifurcation, a relational term that is used both in philosophy and in botany.[2] By asking what gathering shares with collecting and what differentiates the two, we will find out just how much is at stake in this juxtaposition.



Gathering vs. Collecting

Collecting provides the basis for scientific research. Up to the mid-eighteenth century, plant knowledge was obtained by studying living plants in medicinal and botanical gardens.[3] These “unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed”[4]testify to an increased interest in nonnative plants closely tied to an emerging international plant trade. So-called plant hunters[5] were hired to find specific plants in certain areas (mostly in the Global South) and bring them to the colonial centers where, like animals in a zoo, they had to adapt to new climates. When dried plant specimens became the primary objects of botanical study, the focus shifted from keeping plants alive to finding the ideal plant to stabilize a species.[6] Today, plant collecting is still often considered a form of hunting: It implies tracking down a living being, unearthing and then transporting it to a new place, in varying forms.

The hunter/gatherer dichotomy underlying the opposition of collecting/gathering affects the aim of the bringing together as well as the items being brought together. Scientific collecting envisages a state of exhaustiveness, such as, for example, the flora of a certain area.[7] Where gathering does not adhere to these rules, it is considered mere hoarding and warrants psychological or economical intervention. As parts of a collection, the collected plants enter a new stage of being. They become examples (in the garden) or specimens (in an herbarium) for a certain plant species. Collecting transforms plants profoundly: It detaches them from their place of origin, turns them into representations, and assigns them a new place according to an underlying classification. Collecting has thus come to be seen as an objectifying practice.

Gathering, by contrast, seems to affect the assembled objects much less. It is usually understood as a piling-up of things within a confined space, say, a clearing in a forest, without establishing an internal order. In this sense, gathering is related to harvesting, a practice often relying on the prior cultivation of the fruit-bearing plants. After gathering, the assembled items can be transported to a nearby location, such as a kitchen table. While both collecting and gathering rely on the knowledge of place, time, and the shape of plants, only the former is considered a scientific practice. Gathering is usually ranged under Indigenous, everyday, or leisure practices. In accordance with this distinction, gathering carries with it the promise of a kind of immediacy, of being in the moment, in a certain place at a certain time where chance encounters are possible:[8] a positive evaluation that does not take into account the fact that gathering can also be understood as a scientific knowledge practice.

Collecting, by contrast, often comes across as an alienating practice, one that propels the collectors into a future in which they are occupied with the completion of their collection, already thinking beyond the presence of the thing collected.[9]Positively framed, gathering is thus often conceived of as an aim in and of itself, as a way of creating presence. Exactly this quality, however, has been invoked to denigrate gathering vis-à-vis more professional collecting as being idle or useless.

Thus, what differentiates the two verbs most profoundly is what comes after the bringing together. Unlike its counterpart “collecting,” gathering plants often leads to the incorporation of food (seeds, fruits) or medicine/drugs. The implicit economy of gathering implies only taking as much as one needs (for nourishment or healing), distinguishing it from harvesting on a grand scale and from collecting, which is often deemed a greedy taking of too much.[10] The exhaustiveness of collecting—along with the question of who has the right to pick plants, where, and to what aim—has resulted in a positive reevaluation of gathering that accentuates a different kind of bringing together, holding the promise of healing.



Gathering (Around) Plants

Although Kimmerer employs the whole range of meaning—gathering people,[11]plants, and abstract notions alike, thus highlighting an at-once nonspecific and all-inclusive practice of bringing together—the redemptive understanding of gathering is central to her book and similar contributions to plant studies.

While Gathering Moss treats a historical and ongoing injustice, namely the eradication of local and Indigenous knowledges and their overwriting by official, i.e., Western, botany, the central argument is diminished by relying on a petrified opposition between science and indigeneity that can only be bridged by a few individuals, here the narrator herself. In this argumentation, it resembles Ursula LeGuin’s lately much-cited essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), in which the author distinguishes between stories told by hunters and those narrated by gatherers, a dichotomy mirroring the assumed gender distribution in the early stages of civilization.[12] In LeGuin, gathering, to little surprise, is valued over hunting: “what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains.”[13] Both Kimmerer and LeGuin argue for a return to a supposed original state of gathering and narrating, one in which living in harmony with nature and opposing extractivism through hunting and collecting are central. The promise is simple: Changing plant stories and practices will result in healing the wounds inflicted by capitalism.

But the idea of gathering plants as a remedy has already infiltrated the wider arena of lifestyle. The lines between Kimmerer et al. and so-called plantfluencers (“Plants make people happy”) have become blurry.[14] In both contexts, plants are supposed to save us, whether the kind of gathering takes place around a traditionally sacred plant (such as holy trees, known in many cultures) or next to the mundane monstera plant living in one’s home. In both cases, only the initiated, those with access to a higher form of life embodied by the plant, will understand the change accomplished by the vegetal presence. It is in this vein that biologist Monica Gagliano reports on her experiments with ayahuasca plants in the Amazon Forest, a practice that she depicts with the discovery gesture common to so many colonial narratives she criticizes in the context of academic botany.[15] Such plant gatherings entail a belief in the healing power of the vegetal through its pure presence. Just by being in human company, plants perform some kind of green magic and change things for the better. The plant turns healer—one that is only there for human ailments. By invoking the sharing of space with plants through gathering, humans once again manage to instrumentalize plants for their very own purposes.

More importantly, though, these kinds of plant encounters are seemingly off-limits to criticism. Gathering as a practice aimed at intense presence and incorporation suggests that plants can indeed be encountered unmediated. Reversely, the kind of mediation that criticism would provide is unwanted when thinking of such plant gathering(s). Or, to think it differently: The plant itself is the medium (of healing, of knowledge production, of “good” vs. the human/animal “evil”), with all the spiritistic baggage that comes along with the term “medium.” Gathering plants, in this vein, is to gather spirits.



Plants Gathering

This summoning of plant spirits leads us to a last idea connected to the term “gathering.” Humans can gather plants in certain places, and plants themselves can gather energy and process information (related to chemicals, temperature, light, etc.). Thus, the transitive use of “gathering,” with plants in the subject position, is rather unproblematic, whereas the transitive use of “collecting” seems to exclude nonhuman entities. The reflexive use of “gathering,” however, seems to be limited to animals. The idea of plants themselves gathering evokes the feeling of uncanniness. One is reminded of fictive plants like Wyndham Lewis’s extraterrestrial triffids forming a sort of army to attack humans.[16]Whereas in collecting, the lack of purpose and aim of the activity is what seems to preclude plants from pursuing it; it is the supposedly static nature of vegetal beings that prevents them from engaging in gathering.

But, once again, this is not entirely true. Plants do indeed form communities in spaces that provide favorable living conditions and can rightly be called “gatherings.”[17]In popular science books, this plant behavior is often narrated in analogy to human societies, the most famous case being Peter Wohlleben’s immensely successful book on The Hidden Life of Trees.[18]

So, if we took seriously the idea that plants can and do indeed gather, to what extent would it destabilize our received notions about subjectivity and identity? Is not a single plant indeed a gathering and therefore always already many? In turn, could we also conceive of plants collecting? And what would this mean for the ensuing ideas of collectivity and collaboration? Instead of upholding the dichotomy of gathering and collecting through all the aforementioned underlying dichotomies, we need to complicate all of these notions in order to think something hitherto unconceivable through phytological critique.




Notes

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[1] You can gather a group of people, but you cannot collect it (except for the specific case of picking up a definite number of people en route to somewhere else). Languages other than English may or may not differentiate here. German, e.g., would perform the difference by prefixes—sammeln (collect) vs. versammeln(gather).

[2] Cf. “Dichotomy,” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 6, 2019 https://www.britannica.com/science/dichotomyas well as John Stevens Henslow, A Dictionary of Botanical Terms ([1857] Cambridge University Press, 2009), 56: “dicho’tomous, dichto’tomus (διχοτομος divided into two) where any part forks or subdivides into two branches, and each of these again into two others.”

[3] For the history of pre-Linnaean plant knowledge, see Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants (Bloomsbury, 2005).

[4]  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences ([1966] Routledge, 2002), 143.

[5] Adventure stories revolving around these plant-collecting mercenaries are continuously being published. See, e.g., Anita Silvey, The Plant Hunters: True Stories of Their Daring Adventures to the Far Corners of the Earth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

[6] Cf. Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimen and Scientific Memory,” Critical Inquiry31, no.1 (2004): 153–82.

[7] Cf. Dominik Berrens, “The Meaning of Flora,” Humanistica Lovaniensia, 68, no. 1 (2019): 237–49.

[8] Such as, e.g., the way in which the anthropologist Anna Tsing describes the pleasures of mushroom picking: “Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just—like flowers—through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.” The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015), 1.

[9] This tension between a desired completeness and its inherent impossibility is at the heart of collecting as a neurotic practice.

[10] In retrospect, this economy of self-sufficiency is often idealized and conflated with Romantic notions of foraging, i.e., not relying on gathering as a primary source of food but supplanting one’s food stock by picking fruit along the way.

[11] The kinds of gathering depicted range from a university seminar focusing on moss-picking, to the appearance of medicinal plants near the source for an illness, to ritualistic practices in which plants play a role (such as moss being used for sanitary pads in “moontime” settings).

[12] For a debunking of this all-too-easy history of civilization, see David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity(Penguin, 2021).

[13] Ursula K. LeGuin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. ([1988] Ignota Books, 2019), 149.

[14] Penelope Green, “Meet the Plantfluencers: In a World of Climate Change, Creating a Biome of One’s Own,” New York Times, November 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/style/08SILL.html

[15] Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books, 2018).

[16] See John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (Penguin, 1951) or the different film and television adaptations from 1962, 1981, or 2009, respectively.

[17] As a biologist, Kimmerer is aware of this behavior and observes “the way that moss species gather together on boulders.” Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003), 2.

[18]For an in-depth reading of Wohlleben and his critics, see Johannes Wankhammer, “Anthropomorphism, Trope, and the Hidden Life of Trees: On Peter Wohlleben’s Rhetoric,” Literatur für Leser 40, no. 2 (2017, published August 2019), 55–67.