Plants are not only biological resources or elements of the environment. They enter human life through medicine, food, cultivation, observation, material practice and cultural interpretation.
This section explores how relationships between humans and plants are formed, transmitted and transformed. It brings together publications asking how biological properties, ecological conditions, practical experience, preparation methods, cultural concepts and systems of knowledge shape the ways plants are perceived and used.
Interstitium uses this field as a conceptual space to examine what often lies between the plant as a biological organism and the plant as an object of human knowledge: encounter, observation, selection, interpretation, practice and accumulated experience.
The focus is not to replace botanical, pharmacological or ecological explanation with cultural interpretation, but to investigate how these dimensions become connected. Plant characteristics acquire human significance within particular environments, practices and systems of classification, while repeated human selection, cultivation and use can alter plant populations, landscapes and biological exposures.
The publications in this area develop scientific essays, research commentaries and analytical perspectives to understand human–plant relationships beyond simple categories such as resource, remedy, crop or symbol. They aim to distinguish evidence from interpretation while making historically and culturally embedded knowledge accessible to scientific investigation.
At its core, this section asks how humans come to know plants and how sustained relationships with plants have shaped human practices, environments, bodies and ways of understanding the living world.
Scope
This section examines human–plant interactions as dynamic relationships between biological properties, ecological settings, human practices and systems of knowledge.
It brings together publications on ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, traditional medicine, plant use, cultivation, domestication, preparation practices, sensory experience, cultural classification and the transmission of plant knowledge. The central concern is how plants become meaningful and biologically consequential within particular human and environmental contexts.
The focus extends across botany, anthropology, archaeology, ethnobiology, pharmacology, ecology, history of medicine, cognitive science and science studies. Common to these fields is the need to avoid treating either plants or human knowledge as isolated objects. Plant use emerges through repeated encounters among organisms, environments, practices, interpretations and biological responses.
Topics include medicinal plant knowledge, traditional formulation, preparation-dependent effects, local plant classification, sensory recognition, knowledge transmission, domestication, landscape management, ritual and symbolic associations, plant-related metaphors, human selection pressures, historical herbals, changing patterns of use, and the translation of traditional observations into testable scientific questions.
This section is especially concerned with cases in which human–plant relationships contain forms of practical or observational knowledge that cannot be understood through chemical composition, cultural meaning or historical description alone. It asks what becomes visible when these dimensions are examined together—without romanticising tradition, reducing it to molecular mechanisms or dismissing it as merely symbolic.
Guiding Questions
How do humans recognise, classify and interpret plants within different ecological and cultural settings?
How do plant properties, preparation practices and human biological states interact to produce different experiences and uses?
What kinds of knowledge emerge through repeated observation, cultivation, preparation and embodied experience?
How have medicinal, nutritional and material relationships with plants shaped human practices, settlements and conceptions of the living world?
How do human selection, cultivation and landscape management transform plant populations and ecological relationships?
Can traditional plant classifications preserve biologically relevant distinctions that conventional scientific categories overlook?
How can historical, ethnobotanical and experiential observations be translated into precise and testable research questions?
What is lost when plants are described only as chemical sources, commodities, symbolic objects or passive elements of the environment?
How can scientific interpretation distinguish empirical knowledge, cultural meaning, historical reconstruction and speculative inference without separating them prematurely?
To what extent have plants shaped human biological and cultural development—not as intentional agents, but through the possibilities, constraints and recurring interactions they introduced?
Selected Publications
The following publications explore these questions through scientific essays, research commentaries and interdisciplinary analysis. They examine human–plant relationships as sources of evidence, interpretation and new research questions while maintaining a clear distinction between documented findings, plausible reconstruction and hypothesis.