Visceral love and more-than-human interembodiment: olive trees as sentient kin in Sicily

Bunkley (2022) defines interembodiment as “the sharing of embodied experiences across and among biological bodies” (3). As an environmental anthropologist thinking in terms of more-than-human relationality, I take this up to ask: what about other kinds of bodies, beyond human ones? Using a political ecology framework, this contribution draws on long-term ethnographic research with olive growers in Sicily, Italy, to consider more-than-human, and especially human-plant, relationality, care, and wellbeing. I argue that plants are sentient kin in what I term Sicilian oliviculturalists' “praxis of care”. Praxis of care refers to participants' articulation of a theory, and its actionable practice, of love, affection, and respect for the beings and landscapes with which they make a living. This praxis of care engenders interembodied relational wellbeing sited in people, plants, landscapes, and livelihoods. I argue that Bunkley's concept of interembodiment is a provocation not only to blur the edges of discrete physical human bodies, but also to re-imagine the responsibilities and pleasures that derive from the relationships humans have with other-than-human bodies.