Cultivating Love: Elderly Women and their Plants in the Belarusian Countryside

This presentation, based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dokšycy district of post-Soviet Belarus, explores how elderly rural women navigate a landscape defined by state-induced neglect (bezkhaziajstvennasć) through their intricate relationships with plants.

Adopting human–plant relations as a central lens, I argue that the careful cultivation of gardens is not merely a subsistence practice, but a powerful act of world-making and a technology of self.

Ultimately, the research is an extended argument for taking seriously the quiet, everyday practices through which life is sustained and meaning is made in the margins. By theorising from the garden, it is possible to discuss agency beyond resistance; to provide examples for thinking about interspecies ethics grounded in lived experience; and to remind ourselves that even in the most “unpromising” of places, the cultivation of a single plant can be a world-making act.

Aliaksandra Shrubok is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests revolving around postsocialism, moral cultivation, care, and, more recently, solidarity.