Dossier: murmurs and traces: plants and animals in dissonant memories

Whenever they tell history, here and there, the older people who knew it or heard it, but also the young people who seek it out, sow signs in the presence of a plant (a myrtle tree, a bamboo grove, a grassland), an animal (an armadillo, a bear, a bull, a snake, a deer, and a few others), or a place that exists because of some vital presence (and in this case, water and roads are the paths of history). These presences often appear, for those who know, as traces and murmurs. What do these murmurs and traces say to the fabric of memory? Would it be possible to speak of vegetal memories without restricting ourselves to botanical knowledge? Would it be possible to reconstruct animal memories without isolating ourselves in fable or symbol? And what about the unusual confluence of paths and memory, if it is true that plants and animals walk? Would it be possible that both are also telling each other's history as a path of traces and dead leaves, and that this is a general way of telling things and making memories for life? And how would such a memory be written if not through multiple co-authorships or at least with the decentralized authorship of amanuensis researchers? Finally, in what ways does the relationship between story, time, and the natural environment occur? How do we navigate memory, traces, and what we have called "material culture"?

Finding traces is also reconstructing and telling histories. The details of animal lives are found in them. In different places and times, these histories have been told as a source of inspiration and instruction for living a better life. Not as metaphors for virtue, as fables are usually understood, but as lessons we can learn from a concrete, ground-level experience.

In the countryside, the movement of branches, the passage of the wind against the tall grass, or the crackling of canes growing in the scorching sun or contracting at night, the sudden fall of a tree overwhelmed by a voracious parasitic plant that destroys it, make murmurs, if not screams. What do these murmurs and screams say? What memory do they tell?

We invite papers, essays, and studies that may be collaborative or solely authored, as long as they converse with plants and animals to tell history and memorialize. We expect texts written by many authors (not to say by several hands) and with diverse ramifications. We must respond to the intricate nature of life, which is remade in fits and starts. The social sciences have recorded these histories in which plants and animals appear as props of memory, but they have not paused to consider them with sufficient generosity. We are living in a moment of life crisis in which everything seems to be monoculture, agro-industrial writing, or suddenly grown and insubstantial meat: where the world of life seems to have been reduced to the genetic combinations that standardize the landscape and food. We believe it is necessary to pay attention to them and take them seriously, to see if we can converse with them so that we can hear and see in different ways.

Life can remake itself in creative and generous compositions and is always telling a history. Surely, to have become so diverse, it required the existence of many different memories. What are these more-than-human memories that we can recognize in the traces and murmurs of the dead leaves? For this issue of Memorias disidentes we hope to offer contributions that will help us recognize the varied forms of life that spread in murmurs and leave traces.