ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the conceptual relationships between people and the plants and animals they use, with particular respect to crafts, but also to food. It is the craft implications of the intimacy between plants animals and people that will be explored here. The Mongolian herders that Natasha Fijn a film maker studied keep cattle goats and sheep and horses, which are important for their milk as well as for transport. Research into plant materials in ethnographic accounts and traditional craft practices inevitably led to ideas about how materials would be harvested, and in what ways they might be dealt with to maximize their use in the future. It is not necessary to understand chemicals and physics in the way that modern scientists do, in order to understand how they work, and what cause and effects there might be. Instead, it is useful to think of them by borrowing the term 'folk physics' and coining the term 'bush chemistry'.
