Can the plant speak? Giving tobacco the voice it deserves
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2391146 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrew Russell (0000-0003-4700-8029, Durham University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 472-487 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Material Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1359183518799516 |
| OpenAlex | W2891418688 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 33 |
The idea of non-human objects speaking has an illustrious pedigree. Using Holbraad's (2011) question 'can the thing speak?' as a springboard, the author asks what it means to say that tobacco might speak. Accepting a degree of ventriloquism in giving a voice to plants, he tracks examples of tobacco (and its paraphernalia) speaking in English literary sources, demonstrating that the postmodern turn to 'material agency' and object sentiency, voice and intentionality is, in fact, nothing new. Taking Miller and Latour's conceptions of hybridity in human/non-human relationships seriously, he argues further that tobacco can speak, or remain silent, through a number of different human and corporate locutors. Where tobacco speaks in its own words, its voice - in contrast to the 'tinny but usable' voice of a mushroom spore - becomes that of an imperious autocrat intent on world domination
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Epistemology · Hybridity · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Media studies · Miller · Nothing · Object (grammar · Paraphernalia · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy
Tastes of paradise
Ethnography through Thick and Thin
Dumbstruck
Plants as Persons
How Forests Think
An Essay concerning Human Understanding
Introduction
Reassembling the Social
Thinking Through Things
How Forests Think
Rule of Experts
Contemporary ethnographic practice and the value of serendipity
The Father of Spin
Risking enchantment’
What are “Things” Saying in Renaissance Studies
Social Life Through Literature
Irresistible Empire
Golden Holocaust
The Force of Things
Cambridge Anthropology
Specters of Marx
Truth in Motion
Anthropology and What There Is
What is context
Strathern beyond the Human
Imagining Corporate Personhood
A Chilling Example? Uruguay, Philip Morris International, and WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
Material Culture Studies' and other Ways to Theorize Objects
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |