Gardens Between Above and Below: Cosmotechnics of Generative Surfaces in Abulës-Speaking Nyamikum

ABSTRACT Based on the case of Nyamikum village’s Abulës-Speakers (‘Abelam’) in Papua New Guinea, this paper weaves two parallel discussions: the first shifts our approach of gardens from being horizontal surfaces, covered in assemblages of plants, towards a vertical one, in which gardens are dynamic interfaces upon which recursive processes of generativity and depletion appear in temporal sequences of movement between a space above and another below, acting as a container of capacities. The second discussion focusses on how humans engage with garden plants, enact technics (defined here as a specific configuration of practices/techniques, objects and relations) which facilitate the becoming of plants, in a way that actualises a ‘friendly’ or ‘moral’ order elicitation according to principles of enablement instead of extraction. Finally, the paper makes the hypothesis that the transposition of visual forms created by technics to other places, such as the ceremonial house, makes them as efficacious in manifesting and enabling vital processes of generativity. This leads to the conclusion that technics play indeed a central role in the unifying the moral and the cosmic order, because they always contain a part of material self-evidence which does not rest on conventions or beliefs. As a result, it confirms that local notions of efficacious actions are the bases upon which wider vernacular conceptions (of sociality, of generativity or of morality) and logics can be built.