Eponyms, Heirlooms, Living Memory, and the Planty Memorialization of People

Bibliographic Data

ID13100577
AuthorsMatt Rhodes (0000-0003-1537-3515, Michigan Technological University, corresponding author), Julianna Bartoszek (Michigan Technological University)
Year2025
Volume11
Issue2
Pages474-491
Publication date2025-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2373566x.2025.2548444
OpenAlexW4415597084
LanguageEN
References cited62

While memorialization often invokes stony landscapes of public art, named buildings, and engraved plaques, living memorials occupy parallel and intersecting memory contexts. Plants ascribe processes of memorialization into their landscapes and broader meanings. This paper explores one subsection of these planty memorializations by highlighting fruits, vegetables, and grains whose names include eponyms, or names derived from other people’s names. We also unpack eponyms themselves and their gendered, politicized, and racialized legacies and the potential for both eponyms and their associated living memorials to perpetuate violence. We connect living memorials, eponyms, and their stone-based or toponymic counterparts to patterns within memorial landscapes and the work of memorial reckoning. While we find many representational similarities across memorial patterns, key differences emerge in how certain living memorials have been and continue to be challenged and changed, particularly in comparison to broader patterns of biologically-rooted eponyms and the memorial reckoning of our toponymic landscapes

Key (lock · Living room · Memorialization · Toponymy · Geographies of human-animal interactions

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