The Plant in Beetween. Analogism and Entanglement in an Italian community of anthroposophists

The article analyses the special relationship with the world of plants developed by Anthroposophy in the general frame of the new perspective called ‘plant turn’ (Myers 2015). Anthroposophy is analysed as a peculiar form of Analogism (Descola 2005), historically derived from the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and subsequently evolved into the contemporary Anthroposophical practices that the author encountered during her fieldwork in a community of North-Eastern Italy that developed the “homeodynamic” agriculture. Both Steiner’s texts and Anthroposophical contemporary practices reveal a relationship with the world of plants that the author reads in the light of Ingold’s categories of entanglement of the world, interpenetration of elements, and their ceaseless becoming (Ingold 2011). The result is a representation of the vegetal world involving the whole cosmos, humans and non-humans, terrestrial and non, in a cosmic expansion of the relations between beings typical of Analogisms. The practices referring to the vegetal world enacted by the anthroposophists are intense, engaging, dialogue-based and provocative in their ability to uproot many elements of naturalism and deal with, a contemporary world characterised by the ecological crisis.