“One doesn’t enter a garden and start working straight away,” explained Robin. “It’d disturb the yams. You have to go first to the baarë [garden shelter], start a small fire, chew maassa [areca nut] and smoke a cigarette . . . Then, yams know you’re here and you can start working.” Robin’s clarifications about his morning routine, when entering his yam garden in Nyamikum village (Papua New Guinea), is an example of “respectful care” (see also Angé), without which yams would not grow well among Abulës-Speakers (AKA the “Abelam”).

Yam (Dioscorea esculenta or ka and D. alata or waapi) shifting cultivation is done in gardens (see Figure 1) which can be interpreted as a multi-species milieu, shaped by interactions among humans, other cultivated plants and living beings (like hornbills, butterflies, and spiders), and ancestral entities inhabiting the soil, itself seen as a semi-sentient being. Alongside gardeners’ starting routine, working there involves a careful choreography of movements (see also, Lien and Larsen), observations, and tactile engagements—twining vines around tutors, harvesting ripe plants, transplanting shoots—all mainly with the hands, interacting gently with every one of them individually. Tools like digging sticks and bush-knives are used minimally; the human body itself is the primary interface (see Figure 2). Actions that invite plants also include speaking, singing, blowing on vines, and applying special substances on the path of the growing tuber (Coupaye 2013, 168–172, 207–248).

Plants, especially yams, are seen as autonomous beings and at times are said to have forms of consciousness, as they are capable of perceiving and responding to their milieu. Yams can move, sense smells, hear songs, and even communicate with other plants, though not directly with humans. Though they can speak between themselves and other species, they contact humans only through dreams. Communication with gardeners obviously mobilizes indexical evaluations of the visible parts of the plants, mostly the lusciousness of their vines, but also involves the digging of peep holes underneath the waapi mound to check the tuber end and give it special substances for them to eat and grow deeper. Most exchanges, though, are expressed in terms of transference of substances and energies between human bodies and plants through individual interactions—all of this under the watchful control of baëkwaam gigantic multi-colored worms, who can travel in the underground and help or stop the yams from growing.

These different registers of interaction allow yams to “know” or “feel” the appropriateness of gardeners’ gestures and personhood and to be responsive accordingly. Waapi, the Long Yam, the “Head of all Food,” in particular, which are decorated and displayed during annual ceremonies called Waapi Saaki, play a central role in the ways in which all plants behave: “If the waapi are not pleased by the ceremony, they won’t open the road to the food and we’ll starve,” explained Tëpmanyëngi, one of Nyamikum’s Great Men (Coupaye 2013: 105–109). It is thus the responsibility of the gardeners to please, help, and provide conditions for each individual plant to grow. Reciprocally, waapi have the responsibility to “open the road” and provide the village with all the food it needs.

Melanesian yam cultivation occupies a specific analytical place in the anthropology of plant-human relations. André-George Haudricourt, in a foundational paper, proposed a framework based on two generic modes of action with plants and domesticated animals that echoed wider general conceptions of political relations (1969[1962]). “Indirect negative actions,” which he identified as common among tuber and rice cultivators across Asia and the Pacific, characterise careful and individual action on the plant’s external milieu: preparing a berth of loosened soil for tubers to grow; installing trellises for vines to climb; or using portions of soil left vacant by a harvest to replant another plant. Such actions create the optimum conditions to allow the full expression of plants autonomous living processes.

“Direct positive actions,” by contrast, which he saw as common in Mediterranean domestication of animals and plants, display more “massal” and standardized direct interventions on species, such as successive selections and controlled hybridization. In more recent times, these fit anthropocentric-driven and industrialized logics, such as mechanised processes, homogenisation and disciplining of species, genetic engineering and management, and other technoscientific regimes of care (see for instance, Curry).

As with every framework, Haudricourt’s model deals with general principles rather than a clear-cut typology (see Ferret 2012): cutting down the forest in Nyamikum is a “direct positive action” on the vegetation, with the aim to create the conditions for “indirect negative actions” of enabling cultigens to grow. Direct operations such as cutting, burning, uprooting, or replanting, or breaking the end of a vine to invite division into two branches coexist with the main indirect modes of actions.

However, Haudricourt’s model, which connected cultivation styles to political systems also invites thinking about potential resonance between politics of vegetal care and human politics (see Panoff 1985 and Coupaye 2021). Abulës gardens act as a stage for enacting values, governance, and diplomacy—between humans, plants, and invisible agents. A gardener’s small fire and quiet cigarette is part of a larger choreography of respect, interdependence, and care. Such actions with plants invite us to examine how a specific technicity, as a regime of relations between humans, plants and their milieus, materialises some dimensions of plant-human responsability and indeed extend towards wider conceptualisations of human and non-human politics. Abulës yams are not merely crops—they are partners in a shared world, whose growth hinges as much on ritual diplomacy and moral behavior as on soil and sunlight. Gardening technicity appears there as a relational regime shaped by ethical engagement, attentiveness, and reciprocal obligations.

Acknowledgments

None of these ideas would have emerged without the trust, care and friendship of male and female gardeners of Nyamikum village. Thanks to Olivia Angé, Susannah Chapman, and Sebastian Wolfrum for their comments. All ethnographic and analytical mistakes are mine alone.