2021 Volume 86 Issue 1 Pages 076-095
Animals that carry out pollination are called pollinators. A bundle of relationships connected by pollination is called a pollination system in modern ecology. This paper explores how this system emerges as agency and produces inter- and intra-species interactions in the more-than-human world. In Japan, both the native Japanese honeybee and the European honeybee that was introduced during the Meiji period are distributed and used for both beekeeping and pollination business. A multi-site study in the different contexts of central Tokyo, Tsushima island, and northern Hokkaido showed that the relationship between humans and honeybees is just one part of cross-species associations involving nectar plants, wildlife, various humans （farmers, foresters, hunters, scientists, and bureaucrats）, and potentially invisible others that share the landscape. Negotiations take place among them, forming “kinds.” Whereas previous studies on beekeeping in the humanities tended to limit the analysis on human-bee relations, the author proposes an anthropology of pollination that extends the scope to dynamic pollination systems.
