ABSTRACT
Cereals (pearl, millet and sorghum) are central to the material and the symbolic reproduction of agrarian societies of the Sudano-Sahelian area. However, the centrality of cereals should not hide the diversity of the ecological engineering of a great number of species in various ecosystems. Three cases of plant-human relationships are discussed. Trees of the farmed parkland may be close and familiar to humans or far away in the bush, depending on the cycle of swidden cultivation. A second case deals with leafy vegetables which are prized food. The management of these plants is different from place to place, and the same species can be planted, protected or grow spontaneously in farmed plots or in the bush. The last case is about domesticated species of which wild ancestors are known and which sometimes grow in sympatry (yams, pearl millet, sorghum, bambara groundnut). In most cases, no explicit local theory makes sense of their evolutionary history through domestication. Two models appear: 1) for domesticates, a type of plant is viewed as spontaneous/wild or cultivated/domesticated but the transition from one state to another is not explicitly conceptualized; 2) depending on human behaviors, leafy greens and parkland trees may be spontaneous, protected or planted without being conceptualized as belonging to different categories. It seems that, in local views, humans have little control over the essence of plants – rather they modify their behavior toward them, not the reverse.
