The Need for Seed

Abstract

Abstract The Hindu Kush Himalayas are home to an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals, including an array of traditional crop varieties and landraces. Whilst most scholarship has, to date, sought to preserve this biodiversity by documenting the breadth of species’ and genetic variation, this chapter investigates what we know about the wealth of underlying cultural practices that are generative of agrodiversity. Such practices include festivals in which cultural observances incorporate traditions of care and selection for certain plant qualities, religious sanctuaries that encode the manner of interaction with plants within the sacred boundary, and local cuisines in which knowledge-holders give rise to genetic diversity through selections of different tastes, textures, and aesthetics. Foregrounding biocultural heritage in this way refocuses away from questioning ‘what is diverse’, to ask more fluid questions about how that agrodiversity is brought about by human-plant-animal collaborations through time.