Bad to Think With: Plants and Property Relations
Abstract
Animals, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said, are not just good to eat but good to think with: they elucidate the structure of social relations. But what about plants? In this talk I argue that the ways we relate to plants on the one hand and the matrix of people and things on the other offered by property thought are a bad match. Much of what plants are and do does not neatly fit into the categories of subject and object or body and idea; nor can the problems caused by intellectual and tangible property in plants easily be addressed by the critique of property. To elaborate this point, I want to sketch the trajectories on which plants go astray and slip through our matrices of property (including my own) by exploring some of what has happened in the legal landscape of especially European plant breeding over the last 20 or so years. Whether we should run after plants and leave property behind or, conversely, try to patch up the structure of property relations depends on what we care about more: saving plants or saving property.
About the Speaker
Veit Braun is a sociologist and Research Associate at the University of Augsburg, Germany. His work is situated at the intersection of law, economics and biology. Veit has studied the contemporary crises of property in plant breeding and the organisational and temporal logics of animal biobanks. He is currently leading the research project ‘More and Less’ on the mutable identity of nitrogen in society. His book At the End of Property: Patents, Plants and the Crisis of Propertization was published by Bristol University Press in 2024.
View more information: People, Plants and the Law - Plant Success
About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series
The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.
Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.
This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.
Note that all dates and times displayed are in Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST).
