Planting flowers for the bees: Spirituality, emotion, and embodied subjectivities through relational practices of socioecological care

This research highlights the ways by which processes of caring for our environments can contribute to health and well-being for the minded body. Drawing upon rich ethnographic accounts of urban cultivation practices and experiences, this research unfolds in the birthplace of the ‘Healthy City’ concept—Kuching, Malaysia—which is an ethnically diverse city home to Chinese, Malay, Indigenous and other groups. Building from situated political ecologies—and more specifically, emotional political ecology and the political ecology of religion—I examine the relational values produced through practices of urban cultivation and related benefits for mind-body-environments. I find spirituality, religion, gender, generation, class, and ethnicity are embodied in socionatural relationships facilitated through urban agriculture. Through affective encounters with non-human animals, spiritual meanings inferred from the materiality of plants, and strengthened socionatural relationships with friends, family, even strangers, and the divine, practices of urban cultivation can nurture minds, bodies, and environments in deeply interconnected ways. This adds to a growing literature that reveals the importance of relational values for well-being and argues that socionatural relationships of care can contribute to a meaningful life. With a careful attention to relational dynamics and differentiated embodied experiences, I show that cultivators engage in the production of ecologies of care that confront neoliberal modes of interacting with themselves and others. Recognizing that care is embodied, situated and political can foster more nuanced understandings of the politics of socioecological transformation.