Meithle: Seed migration, communal improvisation, and cultural emergence
Throughout history the movement of seeds has shadowed the translocation of different peoples. Over the centuries, as people have moved around the world, so too have their seeds, grains, and food ways. But more parallels can be drawn between people and their seeds than just their physical migrations. Cultures themselves are borne and have evolved in relation to place-based practices of preparing, sowing, harvesting, and processing — the fundamentals of life which are themselves the stages for the improvisation and evolution of identities.
However, today movement and migration are happening in ways may have previously been unimaginable. People from disparate cultures are being uprooted and brought into contact with one another at lightening speeds. Among many people I speak to there is a sense of loss of belonging to the places they inhabit, no matter where in the world they are. The rich kaleidoscope of place-based practices and identities have become increasingly homogenised by the flat-pack patterns of globalisation. The things which make different places distinctive are rapidly vanishing. But at the same time, attempts to protect these things often end up being expressed as exclusionary and indeed racist form of conservatism.
How do we protect traditional cultures and fragile heritages without consigning them to just becoming museum-pieces? How do we instead create deeply rooted places of possibility, and spaces for cultural improvisation, emergence, and revitalisation? And what lessons can be drawn upon from the ways that grains have continuously evolved, and become rooted in place and in relation throughout history?
Movement
Our major grains have very long histories. For at least twelve thousand years peoples have been selecting, planting, and saving seeds in their locality to feed and nourish themselves and their communities. The practice of planting and saving these grains, generation after generation, is often considered to be directly tied to the development of most major civilizations and to the emergence of a multitude of distinct cultures all over the world. Wild plants were selected, crossed, and dramatically altered by humans who tailored them to meet their needs. The seeds and plants came to be entirely reliant on the human hand in the same way that humans became reliant on the seeds.
Being reasonably easy to transport and to store, over the millennia these grains have spread to almost all corners of the globe. Grains have proven to be very adaptable to lots of climates and conditions, and so as people began to settle in different geographic locations, the grains which travelled with them would slowly adapt to the conditions of these places. With all this a huge amount of genetic diversity has built up within the various grain families.
Former executive director of the Crop Trust, Cary Fowler, puts it that these grains “have encountered and been forced to adapt to almost every conceivable condition… And at each step along the way of that range, crops were forced to adapt to the conditions at hand — adapt or perish… With these characteristics, the result of thousands of years of encounters with pests and diseases and changing environments, they are able to continue to evolve and adapt to new conditions.” [i]
Ever since these wild plants began to be domesticated by humans all these thousands of years ago, these seeds have been moving, always changing, always evolving, always in a continuous state of flux. As the seeds move and change, so to do their people.
As different peoples settle in different parts of the world, place-based cultures begin to come into being. By using the different cultural materials peoples take with them as they migrate, modes of cultural exchange up being expressed in an infinite multitude of ways around the globe — in endless morphings of shapes, sounds, colours, tastes, textures, and tones.
In the Highlands of Scotland where I come from, the peoples of the Gàidhealtachd — the Gaels — have origin stories indicating that they are descendants of Scythian and Egyptian royalty who first arrived in Ireland by way of the Iberian Peninsula. One of their early documents, the Lebor Gabála Érenn or The Book of Invasions, suggests Gaels were the last of a series of different peoples to settle in Ireland. When they then arrived in Scotland from Ireland, they encountered various peoples including the Picts, the Brythonic peoples of Strathclyde and Anglo-Saxon Bernicians. Later, they were further exposed to new peoples and cultures who arrived, for instance, in the form of the Vikings. To a certain extent, this merging and emerging of peoples have continued in similar vein ever since then. And these different peoples’ seeds were always with them.
With these many cross-pollinations of influences, different forms of cultural practices emerge. As the diverse cultural ingredients are brought together, the places themselves where these meetings and meldings take place serve as the cultural melting pots. And over time the common tasks required in dwelling within these places leads to distinctive cultures. These common tasks are what bring the different cultural ingredients together. Where the ways themselves of working together on the land becomes the fertile grounds which nurture improvisation and creation of culture. These processes were not carefully planned. They weren’t precious or profound. They were just life.
In the Gaelic tradition there are thousands of work songs which emerged organically from the tasks and customs of the daily lives of Gaels. In his introduction to “Hebridean Folksongs Vol 1” Hugh Cheape writes that “singing to accompany work — to ease the burden — has probably been a universal practice and custom. In the Gaelic world (as elsewhere), singing extended to a range of other work tasks and communal activities. Comparable song-types with choral refrain are on record and remembered as rowing songs, songs for reaping with the sickle and grinding grain with the quern, and songs for milking the cow and churning the milk for butter. Such communal activities accompanied by song would often turn into social events in the life of a community.” [ii]
These social events were the setting and stage for where culture and tradition was both re-created and created afresh. Many of these songs that emerged in the process of working, were likely to have been improvised on the spot. In 1967 Mary Murray of Uig, Lewis was recorded saying that while working, “we made up our own songs. One group would tease someone about a boy… They worked that way and teased each other about different men. It could be an old man, and it was awfully good to tease about an old man, and we would have a good laugh.”[iii] John Lorne Campbell proposed that the repetitiveness of the work plus the familiarity of setting, of co-workers, and of the work itself allowed for new songs to be ‘improvised under semi-trance conditions. This accounts not only for their sectional structure and their frequent use of formulaic passages, but also for their spontaneity and their complete lack of self-consciousness.”[iv]
The important thing to note here is that the conditions were just right to allow for free, spontaneous improvisation which allowed for land based cultural traditions to be both continued and newly created, in what Hamish Henderson referred to as the “carrying stream.”
Over time, as machines began to supersede this communal labour, the fields and this work gradually ceased to be the venues where these communities and cultural practices were cultivated. As people began to lose this more intimate and convivial contact with the land, the bonds and ties between culture and the land also began to loosen. These ways of nurturing cultural diversity and community by working together on common tasks began to disappear.
And as mechanisation replaced communal work, the genetic diversity within these places’ and peoples’ grains were replaced by grains which were more suited to these mechanisations. In the past, every region in the British Isles would have a few locally adapted varieties and landraces and maybe some local customs and traditions that would accompany them, today, these have practically all disappeared. Today, we know that most of the hundreds of thousands of grain accessions and varieties that have emerged around the globe are now under threat, sometimes critically. Over the past 70 years or so, more and more parts of the world have abandoned traditional farming practices for more industrial systems. When this happens, the genetic diversity that has been building up, in some cases for millennia, can disappear very quickly, sometimes in the space of a decade. And once gone, it is often gone forever.
As Fowler says — “To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious.”[v]
This is as true for cultural diversity as it is for genetic diversity.
Many farmers and crop scientists are starting to understand that modern varieties, which are bred for yield above all else, are not suited to low input growing or changing climatic conditions, not to mention flavour and nutrition. But we don’t often consider the damage done by disconnecting grains from their histories, places, peoples, or cultures. Each of these older seed varieties belongs to a distinct culture and place. There are likely all sorts of traditions, stories and myths, rituals, songs, and festivals that are associated with a lot of them. As modernity, with its speed and efficiency, has found its way into most of our agricultural practices, older ways of relating to, working and being on the land have been marginalized and disappeared. Whilst Rachel Carson’s watershed 1962 book “The Silent Spring” awakened an awareness of the ecological damage that our agricultural practices were causing, we may also need to consider the potential damage of ‘the songless harvest’ to our cultures.
This rupturing and breaking apart different aspects of living cultures has left many of us today disconnected from a sense of belonging, a sense of culture, and a sense of connection to the land. To understand how to go about recovering and reinvigorating some of the ways of relating to the world which have been lost, it may be true that we can learn from the ruins of this past. The things that were actively dismembered, and then forgotten, need now to be re-membered and put back together in a way that makes sense and are appropriate for today. Sociologist Boaventura De Sousa Santos says that these ruins are in fact the seeds for imagining a more hopeful future. He describes them as “both memory and alternative future at one and the same time” and as such “both ruins and seeds.”[vi]
In 2021, in an attempt to identify some of these ruin seeds and re-pair them back together in some way, I helped to host an event which we called ‘Meithle’.
Roots
The Scottish Gaelic word meithle, which Dwelly’s Gaelic dictionary translates as “reapers, crowds, concourse,”[vii] almost certainly shares common roots with the Irish word meitheal, both derived from an early term designating operative labour system where groups of neighbours help each other with common farming tasks such as harvesting grain. Which is exactly what we attempted to do.
In two locations in the Gàidhealtachd we planted several different types of heritage grains in the spring including different varieties of Emmer and Einkorn, two of the very first crops to be domesticated in the Near East, and samples of the last remaining landraces in Scotland: small, bristle oats, Hebridean rye and bere barley, which is thought to be the longest continuously cultivated crop in the British Isles. In the autumn, we gathered folks to come together to take part in their harvest.
It was a slightly overcast September weekend, with folk of all ages gathered from near and far on this remote hillside in the Highlands. After the grains were blessed with an old ceremonial Gaelic blessing, which we’d found from a 19th century text, we all took sickles in hand and began not only reap the grain, but sing whilst doing so. The Gaelic reaping songs we sung were some of the few we could dig out of the repertoire. Unlike the more common waulking or rowing songs within the repertoire, which were still active working songs when audio recorders first found them, the reaping songs had by that point fallen out of practice. In all probability these songs had not been sung together whilst reaping grain for generations. Once the field was all but harvested, we observed the age-old tradition or ritual of retaining the last sheath, the Cailleach or the sacred hag who reins over winter or the season of decay. This special sheath needs to be handled carefully and not allowed to touch the ground until it’s returned to the earth the following spring. This act ushers in the season of growth. Once the season’s bounty was all safely in, everyone shared a meal together, which included food made from some of these unusual grains, which many participants had never tasted.
In a very small, but for many of us, powerful way we had started to attempt to re-pair the old seeds with some of the old cultural traditions of this place. Photojournalist David Lintern who covered the event wrote that, “as we begin to work and sing, an acoustic spell is cast. The effect is immediate and its rightness self-evident, in the way that music in congregation — be it at a festival or a place of worship — is understood the world over. Equally important is that we cast it together. There is community in working, singing, or humming in unison. Shivers ascend spines, tummies feel funny. Meithle feels like a small act of practical magic.”[viii]
I agree, there was a kind of magic that weekend: in coming together with sickles and songs these old, ruin seeds had started taking root. But to what end? Where do we go from here?
If we decide to continue to gather to ‘meithle,’ do we just keep automatically repeating the same songs year in year out and keep offering the same archaic blessing from a time long since passed? The songs and blessings we’d found could well have been just improvisations that emerged from the work and from the field. Today these songs and blessings, despite being very beautiful and containing much in the way of historic interest, seem to be of another time and of another way of life. Do we just keep repeating these pieces year in year out, re-performing a fixed piece of heritage? To do this would quickly feel stale and irrelevant, even inauthentic, and exclusionary.
The real question then, given how much diversity is being lost, is how we can protect and safeguard traditional and indigenous cultures, keeping them alive, while at the same time allowing for people from elsewhere to come in and help shape what direction these cultures go?
As Adrienne Maree Brown asks, “How can we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves?”[ix]
Let me return briefly to heritage grains. One thing that these older grains are seen to possess is their long, robust root systems. These roots allow them to deeply connect to the places where they are. Likewise, when we think of traditional or indigenous societies, we often describe them as having deep roots in ways that we might perceive modern, western societies to lack. Both are rooted to their places.
It’s easy to conflate a deep sense of roots with a sense of belonging — where roots equals belonging. This sense of belonging is something that many of us yearn for today. Philosopher and mystic Simone Weil even said that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”[x] However, According to Minority language Professor Conchur Ó Giollagáin, many groups and people today are “dispossessed of their cultural roots, cut off from their history in an era of socio-cultural amputation.”[xi] This may leave the many of us who feel distanced or removed from our “roots” somehow lacking this deeper sense of belonging to place. This is a major issue to try to grapple with. Poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant put it that “when identity is determined by a root, the emigrant is condemned (especially in the second generation) to being split and flattened. Usually an outcast in the place he has newly set anchor, he is forced into impossible attempts to reconcile his former and his present belonging.”[xii]
In trying to define what we mean when refer to “heritage grains” the most understood description would be grains which were in use and circulation prior to the advent of the Green Revolution, when it ushered in a new era of short strawed, high yielding, hybridized seeds which were reliant on chemical inputs. Some may argue the case that it goes back a little further and would instead be varieties that existed before the 1880s. Either way, both definitions involve two historic break points where heritage grains cease to be heritage grains. These are End of Histories moments where lines are created in the sand — either you are before these historic marker points, or you are after it. There is no real room for manoeuvre.
Equally, when we look at definitions of who can be termed “indigenous” we also run into similar issues. A somewhat problematic definition given by the UN and the International Labour Organisation claims that Indigenous peoples “are descendants of those who inhabited a country or geographic region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived.”[xiii]
These two definitions both impose End of Histories where either you are or you are not indigenous, or where grain is or is not heritage. This leads to the obvious question of what happens to everything and everyone who come after that?
I’d argue that both definitions come about because of what anthropologist Tim Ingold refers to as “genealogical thinking.”[xiv] In this established pattern of Western thought, time is perceived in a horizontal timeline which is constantly moving on and away from the past. As we move further and further away from these end points in history it becomes harder and harder to define who is allowed to be called indigenous or what is allowed to be classed as heritage.
These definitions also fail to acknowledge that all the way up to these historic points, they were living, breathing seeds and cultures, never static and always in a constant process of change, exchange, movement, and adaptation. They seem to imply that up until these End of History points these cultures, peoples and seeds had been fully formed, static and congealed into their fixed and final forms. The definitions also fail to consider that fact that the length of historic time ahead of us could well be equally as infinite as the length of time behind us. If these are the end points in history, where will we be in a thousand years?
In genealogical ways of thinking, there inevitably ends up being a focus on exclusionary measures, which allow for definition of who or what’s allowed in and who or what is not. And as time continues to roll along away from these break points, the whole process becomes more and more plagued with endless issues of discrimination and exclusion. Where the things which are indigenous or heritage end up belonging to “roots” from a time which becomes more and more distant, removed, and remote. Within this genealogical framework a person’s position within history seems somehow pre-determined. The only relevant factor is where a person or seed has come from genealogically. Tim Ingold describes this as being “fixed quite independently of their position and involvement in the lifeworld,”[xv] and entirely separate from what how the person or a seed actually lives.
This form of genealogical thinking could in fact be seen as being in opposition to the ways in which many groups of indigenous peoples themselves perceive the world. Where, as Ingold puts it, “it is in their relationships with the land, in the very business of dwelling, that their history unfolds. Both the land and the living beings who inhabit it are caught up in the same, ongoing historical process.”[xvi] Ways of being and cultural norms emerge and evolve as processes of relation play out over time within specific places. In an understanding based on being in relation and being in relationships, things become more fluid and cease to be so much about exclusion. They instead become about actually living and being on land and being in place.
Improvisation
As people from disparate cultural groups continue to be brought amongst one another, we need to find new ways to form cultural coherence. From the old roots of what is or what has been we need to find ways these can be in relation to cultural roots from elsewhere. New culture must be able to emerge from these roots to in order keep the old one living.
As we’ve learned from the research of the past few decades around the ways that mycorrhizal associations are formed with different plants and their roots, roots are nothing if they are not living in relationship. Without making these fungal connections and symbiotic links, individual plants and their roots are not strong and are not truly rooted to soil or place. Farmer Michael Phillips wrote that “the mutualistic relationship between plant roots and fungi goes largely unseen, yet pulses through the top inches of healthy soil everywhere. This collaboration is one of several that make possible life on earth.”[xvii] Biologist Merlin Sheldrake adds that “many fungi can live within the roots of a single plant, and many plants can connect with a single fungal network… in simple terms, plants are socially networked by fungi.”[xviii]
Roots need to live in relation. By using the mycorrhizosphere to help us to understand what roots are doing, the metaphor of cultural ‘rootedness’ becomes less problematic. Thinking about roots in this way potentially opens doors to new possibilities. A cultural understanding based on relation becomes fluid and ceases to be so much about exclusion and instead about living and being in place. For life to continue not as something static but as something ever changing and evolving.
Sheldrake says that the “Connections between hyphae and roots are dynamic, formed and re-formed as root tips and fungal hyphae get old and die. These are relationships that ceaselessly remodel themselves. If you could place your olfactory epithelium into the soil, it would feel like the performance of a jazz group, with the players listening, interacting, responding to one another in real time.”[xix]
Jazz is also a useful metaphor here. For Jazz to work it requires that musicians to be both highly skilled but importantly that they also listen deeply and be attentive and empathetic to one another. Jazz is a form which requires continual dialogue and exchange; where the improvisation is required and where music is vital, emergent, unforeseeable; where players respond to one another, at times bordering on chaos or incoherence, potentially going off in new directions without knowing exactly what might come next.
As Frank J. Barrett says, “Jazz players improvise their way into the future.”[xx]
Recalling the conditions which allowed for so many Gaelic work songs to come into being, as described by Mary Murray and John Lorne Campbell, Barrett then describes jazz as being “about creating a venue where experimentation is the norm, where people think out loud in all sorts of directions and articulate their half-formed thoughts without feeling they have to be perfect or right or defensive or conform to any orthodoxy before offering an insight.”[xxi]
We need to consider what conditions are needed for new possibilities to emerge from. Where new, living, breathing forms of cultures can come into being — yes, rooted in the cultures that have already existed in this place, but in a vital and lifegiving relationship to cultures and peoples from elsewhere. Imagining into the future cannot be about purely protecting and safeguarding the old, the heritage, or even the indigenous at the exclusion of anything new, other or from elsewhere. In the way that great jazz musicians must deeply listen to and be respectful and attentive to the offerings of one another to create great music and musical possibilities, so too must we work out how to create unforeseeable cultural possibilities.
Again, there are ruin seeds that we can draw upon within an existing culture and history here in the Gàidhealtachd to help with these processes. A particularly useful seed to draw upon could be the formerly widespread practice of fosterage within clan society, where young children would be placed into the care and charge of other members of the clan all through their childhoods. This was important enough an aspect of Gaelic society that elaborate rules were laid down into the Gaelic laws tracts as to how these relations would work. And the relations arising from this practice were generally considered to be the most sacred of the whole social system. Stronger affection often emerged between persons standing in those relations than that between immediate relatives by birth, and this was expressed through proverbs such as “the bonds of milk are stronger than the bonds of blood.”[xxii]
Can we reimagine what this mean in today’s context, where the Gàidhealtachd is able to foster and become home to peoples and cultures from around the globe? Where folk can come to and be a part of shaping and creating this place’s future? Where the starting point is not ‘inclusion’ or integrating into a pre-existing culture, but instead coming together and helping to shape new cultures through roots acting in relationship? As we’ve seen from when, for instance, traditional farmers were integrated into the green revolution or when the Gaels were integrated into British society, the idea of integration has not helped resilience, diversity, or cultural self-determination. The premise of integration has not created spaces where new place-based possibilities can emerge from. The opposite of exclusion is not inclusion, but possibility.
Creolization
While Jazz might be a strong metaphor to help us understand this process, I’d suggest that a methodology to begin to put this into real life practice and unlock future possibilities could be “creolization.”
The Oxford Classic Dictionary describes creolization as “the process by which elements of different cultures are blended together to create a new culture.”[xxiii] Within the Caribbean and other archipelagos around the world where Creole cultures have come into being over the past 300 or so years, diverse peoples have very often abruptly, and violently been thrown together and have subsequently intermixed to produce unforeseeable cultures. To work, creolization takes it as a given that each cultural component offered in by each disparate culture is of equal value and importance and that each separate element is necessary. The forms that emerge are never static and are continuously destabilizing themselves then re-adjusting to their “immediate interactive context, improvising as they adjust to new situations. Creolization can thus liberate us conceptually from the notion of fixed or “finished” products of culture.”[xxiv] Ongoing encounters between diverse parts become creative exchanges. The forms that emerge from these express things that are fresh and vital whilst at the same time enable some retention of the multiple divergent traditions that interact. This methodology can be seen as “cultural creativity in process. When cultures come into contact, expressive forms and performances emerge from their encounter, embodying the sources that shape them yet constituting new and different entities. Fluid in their adaptation to changing circumstances and open to multiple meanings, Creole forms are expressions of culture in transition and transformation.”[xxv] Creolization is a process which allows for new cultural possibilities to come into being.
At the Meithle event I was asked an important question. What exactly is the point of keeping these economically unviable, unproductive, and seemingly irrelevant old landrace seeds living? These are grains which today only survive on marginal land on the seemingly peripheral Western and Northern Isles, and which, until recently had not been used as human food for generations. What exactly is the point of going to all the effort of keeping them alive and continuing the practice of cultivating them year in and year out? Are they seed which somehow contain something important for our future food systems or are they purely cultural items? To me the answer is that they are both.
In Brazil, rather than being called “heritage” seeds or “landraces”, those traditional local seeds which are in circulation are referred to as “Creole seeds,” and have legal protections as such. These creole seeds, which farmers, landless workers, and indigenous peoples have selected, developed over time, and then freely exchange with one another, are able to remain adaptive in response to whatever locations, environments, and conditions they find themselves in. Rather than fixating on them being “heritage,” privileging this part of their genetic makeup as the thing that is important and celebrating their ability to reconstitute themselves as they come into contact with different peoples, places, and seeds is a liberating idea.
Viviane Camejo, who researches the conservation of these Creole seeds, wrote that “each creole seed has a story and an affective relationship with the agriculturist who keeps them… Some people say the seed is part of the family legacy. And each variety will have a story with the family: some couples won the seeds when they were engaged or when they got married, so they keep always planting the same seed…I can see that the guardians have a kind of moral commitment to adopt the exchange.”[xxvi] Further describing the different exchanges that come about because of these types of seed marriages, seed educator Martín Prechtel writes that “the seeds, the plants, the yearly cycle of farming the food harvest rituals, food taboos, and the preparation of both parties all had to come together, becoming a new ritual culture with a new language, ritual tool reverence, and sacred field architecture. Because of this, the seeds equalled culture, and any indigenous people accepting such a gift from another knew they were adopting a new culture that would forever mix and mutate who and what they’d been in the past. But this has happened over and over, creating culture in its wake in a pulse of ongoing natural, organic evolution of seed marriages.”[xxvii]
It’s entirely possible to imagine that through processes like these seed marriages our landraces may be able to retain their cultural significance and their embedded wisdom of how to thrive in marginal, tough conditions, whilst at the same time receiving from elsewhere things that they appear to be lacking. Through coming into contact with seeds from elsewhere, they may become more vital, productive, and relevant but also be forever changed in unforeseeable ways. We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace this. This is OK. As Prechtel says “Genetic and cultural integrity must have motion, pulse, cycles, change and renewal with the old. Purity is static, with a single-eyed vision of pure and muddied, which only breeds polarities, war, and atrophy.”[xxviii]
To engage in processes of creolization requires us all to draw on and engage with elements from our own diverse cultural heritages and from these deciding what elements we deem to be the essential ones. What do we actively choose to keep and bring forward into the present and future to work with elements that others have brought forward? The things we choose to bring to the communal pot to improvise with are the starting points for creolization. As jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus said “You can’t improvise on nothing. You gotta improvise on something.”[xxix] Therefore, we need to rediscover our ruin seeds. We need to recover our seeds so we can give and receive seeds from others.
These processes of creolization have the potential to liberate us from the idea that our cultures, our heritage, and our seeds are rigid, fixed, unchangeable and in stasis. These processes enable our heritages to be vital and relevant. Events like Meithle can be places where folks can gather with a common purpose and perform or improvise aspects of their cultures, not as museums to simply keep repeating items from the past, but to be the venues for new forms of cultural emergence to happen reflecting the needs and conditions of today. As Tim Ingold says, the important thing about these types of events is not so much re-creating exact replicas of past performances, but rather just keeping these processes going. If we can find spaces and places where these exchanges can regularly happen then “there is no opposition, in the terms of the relational model, between continuity and change.”[xxx]
Roots are nothing without relationship. Cultures and seeds are not static. Ways of gathering such as Meithle could well be ways of enabling new possibilities for authentic cultures of habitat to emerge. Where we can start to get glimpses of different ways to be together on the land. As Prechtel says it’s “not old lost cultures that should reappear from the past, but viable, fresh, never-before-seen cultures that still retained the same root of indigenous integrity.”[xxxi] By gathering like this on the land, bringing together our disparate seeds and cultures we may be able to start to improvise our ways into the future.
Baron, Robert & Cara, Ana C. (2011) — “Creolization as cultural creativity,” The University Press of Mississippi, USA
Barrett, Frank J. (2012) — “Yes to the Mess: Surprising leadership lessons from jazz,” Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, USA
Brown, Adrienne Maree (2021) — “Holding Change: The way of emergent strategy facilitation and mediation” AK Press, Edinburgh, Scotland
Campbell, John Lorne (1969) — “Hebridean folksongs (Vol I): A collection of waulking songs” Birlinn Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland
Dwelly, Edward (1901) — “Dwelly’s illustrated Gaelic to English Dictionary” Gairm Publications, Glasgow Scotland
Fowler, Cary (1990) — “Shattering: Food, politics and the loss of genetic diversity” University of Arizona Press
Ó Giollagáin, Conchúr (2016) — “Rethinking Our Condition: Language Minorities in Globalised Modernity” — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctn112Uns54
Glissant, Édouard (1997) — “Poetics of Relation” University of Michigan Press, USA
- (2020) “Introduction to a poetics of diversity” Liverpool University Press, UK
Ingold, Tim (2000) — “Perception of the environment: Essays of livelihood, dwelling and skill” Routledge, Abingdon, UK
Lintern, David (2022) — “The reaping” https://www.inkcapjournal.co.uk/the-reaping/
Phillips, Michael (2017) — “Mycorhizzal Planet: How symbiotic fungi work with roots to support plant health and build soil fertility,” Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, USA
Prechtel, Martín (2012) — “The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The parallel lives of people as plants: Keeping the seeds alive”, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California
Santos, Boaventura De Sousa (2018) “The end of the cognitive empire: The coming age of epistemologies of the south,” Duke University Press, USA
Sheldrake, Merlin (2021)– “Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures” Vintage, New York, USA
Weil, Simone (1952) — “The need for roots” Routledge, Abingdon, UK
[i] Fowler, 1990, p.25
[ii] Campbell, 1969, p. e
[iii] Campbell, 1969, p.h
[iv] Campbell, 1969, p.h
[v] Fowler, 1990, p.ix
[vi] Santos, 2018, p.29–30
[vii] Dwelly, 1901, p.647
[viii] https://www.inkcapjournal.co.uk/the-reaping/
[ix] Brown, 2021, p.4
[x] Weil, 1952, p.43
[xi] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctn112Uns54
[xii] Glissant, 1997, p.143
[xiii] Ingold, 2000, p.163
[xiv] Ingold, 2000, p.165–173
[xv] Ingold, 2000, p.172
[xvi] Ingold, 2000. P.173
[xvii] Phillips, 2017, p.5
[xviii] Sheldrake, 2021, p.13
[xix] Sheldrake, 2021, p.41–42
[xx] Barrett, 2012, p.165
[xxi] Barrett, 2012, p.112
[xxii] https://chambersarchitects.com/blog/the-croft-houses-of-scotland/
[xxiii]https://oxfordre.com/classics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore-9780199381135-e-6981;jsessionid=C5917D3CA38ECC515B781F5AF6251DD2
[xxiv] Baron & Cara, 2011, p.4
[xxv] Baron & Cara, 2011, p.3
[xxvii] Prechtel, 2012, p.345
[xxviii] Prechtel, 2012, p.248
[xxix] Barrett, 2012, p.67
[xxx] Ingold, 2000, p.183
[xxxi] Prechtel, 2012, p.312
