Plant knowledge: transfers, shaping and states in plant practices (original) (raw)
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Knowledge transfers, shaping and states in plant practices
How do we know plants? I have over the last few years become preoccupied with the question of how humans gather knowledge about plants. The knowledge question in the various disciplines that investigate plant life and its relations to others is of course varied and largely contingent on a set of epistemological assumptions that are often culturally specific. Epistemological and culturally specific is used here to indicate the underlying assumptions of an indigenous reason that has its own set of indigenous problematics societies will aim to resolve though a somewhat unique " cultural " behaviours. Those familiar with his work will of course recognize the formulation of De Castro in positing what he understands culture to be in the previous sentence (see De Castro 2014). De Castro includes in this formulation those western epistemologies like science and in the following paper I want to use this very open and radically coeval (again to borrow liberally from De Castro's work) approach to indigenous reason so that I can analyse the knowledge production, transfers and creation in several ethnographic settings I worked in. I will draw on my investigations among Rastafari during the late 1990's in the Western Cape and more recently in the Namaqualand between 2014-2016. I also refer to research done with the Khomani San between 1999-2004 as well as work with traditional healer Gogo Mokete from 1998-1999. The paper is also informed by fieldwork in the Matzikama ,the Northern Cape and on recent photovoice exercise with children living on farms in the Keisie Vallei outside Montagu in the Western Cape. I will draw insights from each of these settings in order to suggest how knowledge transfer happens in the field of ?? plant practices. However I must note that the investigation is not a simple matter of epistemology. Assessing how knowledge is transferred and produced can give insight into plants as beings and the type of beings we assume that they are. Ethnographic evidence indicates that the production of plant knowledge is not matter of only cataloguing, documenting and collecting oddments knowledge but that it is about cultivating physical, mental, spiritual and even altered psychic states that enable knowledge transfers and open the plant
Plant Worlds: Assembling the Ethnobotanical
TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly, 2018
Without plants, life on earth as we know it simply could not exist. In terms of sheer mass, plants dominate terrestrial ecosystems, with one thousand times more plant than animal biomass on land (Bar-on et al. 2018). Within this vital mass is incredibly diversity: according to recent estimates, there are just shy of four hundred thousand species of plants in the world (Willis 2017). The significance of this is as much cultural as it is ecological. All human societies rely on plants in myriad ways – as resources, as symbols, as ideas, as cohabitants. And like an optical illusion, while often going completely unnoticed, the centrality of plants to social life, once seen, cannot be unseen. Just as they do in ecosystems, plants underpin and thread their way through human social worlds with grace and tenacity.
The Materiality of Plants: Plant-People Entanglements
World Archaeology 46(5) 2014: 799-812, 2014
Plants in archaeology tend to be studied from an anthropocentric point of view, in which they are seen as passive objects (domestication, farming, deforestation, diet, trade, food and status). Here the concept of materiality is applied to view plant–people relationships from the plant’s point of view, that is, to afford plants agency. It is argued that this brings into clearer focus the complex entanglements or meshworks that are created, often unintentionally, when plants and people interact. Concepts such as materiality, relationality and entanglement help us not only to foreground the vital importance of plants in human (and animal) life, but to appreciate that these plants are best studied within the complex webs of relationships that exist between plants, animals, objects, environments and people.
Art, Spirit, and Plants: On Botanical Abstraction, Vegetal Ontology, and Mystical States
2022
In my thesis, I investigate the intersections between artistic practice, spiritual practice, particularly one that harnesses mystical states, and vegetal ontology. I consider the transformative potential of human’s engagement with the vegetal model of thought, the affinities between plant-thinking and mystical experience, their parallel implications for aesthetics and more than human ecologies, and their manifestations in mystical art. Bringing together the strands of art criticism, environmental humanities, and an array of interdisciplinary considerations of the sublime and mystical states. I focus predominantly on the botanical abstraction of two twentieth-century artist-mystics, Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz. My aim is to reconsider their practice through the environmental lens inspired by plant philosophy, on one hand, and spiritual ecology, on the other. I explore how their art is linked to mystical visions galvanised by Christian religion, Theosophy, esotericism, and other spiritual traditions, as well as their enduring and profound botanical interests, and the interconnections between the two. While centred on art at its core, my research was first and foremost inspired by plants and their unique forms of thinking and being, specifically by research around plant intelligence and philosophy of vegetal minds. My contemplation on vegetal ontology and the ways we can approach and engage with the vegetal minds is what brought me to the consideration of mysticism, and the promise of the experience of sublime for the present techno-capitalist, neoliberal system that defines our age. I propose that mystical states are a sublimation of plant-thinking and aim to re-evaluate the oeuvre of Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz through an eco-mystical/vegetal lens.
Keeping life going: Plants and people today, yesterday and tomorrow
Social Compass
I review the contributions to this special issue by focusing on the relational qualities that bind people and plants together through religious ritualization of economic activities such as crop cultivation or plant gathering in the wild. I show how an attention to plants as teachers facilitates cross-cultural comparative analysis.
Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography
Progress in Human Geography, 2021
Attention to plant life is currently flourishing across the social sciences and humanities. This paper introduces recent work in the informal sub-discipline of 'vegetal geography', placing it into conversation with the transdisciplinary field of 'critical plant studies' [CPS], a broad framework for re-evaluating plants and humanplant interactions informed by principles of agency, ethics, cognition and language. I explore three key themes of interest to multispecies scholars looking to attend more closely to vegetal life, namely: (1) plant otherness; (2) plant ethics; (3) plant-human attunements, in the hope of encouraging greater cross-pollination between more-than-human geography and critical plant studies.
Plants & Pathways: More-than-Human Worlds of Power, Knowledge, and Healing
Dissertation, 2020
This dissertation investigates the pathways and consequences of the commodification of ayahuasca, an Indigenous psychoactive and medicinal Amazonian plant brew, and the Shipibo healing rituals associated with its use. The “ayahuasca complex” is an assemblage of socionatural boundary beings, more-than-human relations, and interspecies and Indigenous practices that produce ayahuasca as a global commodity. I argue that the ayahuasca complex produces worlds in which both plant beings and humans participate, and which create ontological openings toward life. Providing healing services to outsiders is one way that Shipibo communities in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon have responded to the conditions of globalization and regional histories of colonial violence, racism, and resource extractivism; but these communities are still living in great poverty. This dissertation unfolds in response to four guiding research questions: (1) how does the commodification of ayahuasca differ, if at all, from the socioeconomic and socioecological relations that have defined the extraction of other resources in Ucayali?; (2) how do Shipibo communities and healers benefit from ayahuasca tourism and what are the limitations on their ability to benefit?; (3) how does the adoption of Shipibo healing practices by outsiders affect relationships between humans and plant beings?; and (4) how can outsiders and researchers like myself work in Shipibo communities in ways that are not exploitative and extractive? My findings are based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Ucayali, Peru (over five years), in which I conducted interviews, ecological studies, focus groups, and participant-observation of practices associated with ayahuasca, including harvesting, cooking, and healing. I also lived and worked in Shipibo communities and became involved in NGO projects and a community-based forest management project. My work dwells at the intersection of political ecology, STS (Science, Technology, and Society), environmental history, and environmental anthropology while also emphasizing decolonial approaches and introducing feminist and multispecies lenses to this topic. I use a political ecology framework to show that although the ayahuasca boom may appear similar to other extractive frontiers, the plants used to make ayahuasca also resist commodification in certain ways and create their own particular economic pathways that do not conform to usual commodity circuits. Nonetheless, as with other extractive economies, resources flow northward to rich countries through the growing ayahuasca commodity web. Although the commodification of ayahuasca does open up channels for resources to flow back to Shipibo communities, benefits and power continue to be concentrated in the North, and Shipibo communities are constrained by ongoing structural racism from capitalizing on the commodification of ayahuasca. I find that a legacy of colonial exploitation and extractivism still structures racialized hierarchies in Ucayali and globally, which constrain Shipibo healers’ ability to benefit from capitalist/colonial systems of power. However, ayahuasca’s particular relationships with humans, both material and cultural, causes it to behave unusually as a commodity. This dissertation reveals that plants themselves are important actors in commodity networks. I argue that as the ayahuasca complex moves through capitalist and reductionist frameworks, plant-human relations are altered in such a way that plant agency is constricted. My work draws from the literature on political ontology to understand relational practices as constitutive of worlds. Ayahuasca’s relationship with humans, therefore, is constituted through specific practices that shift as they move through different ontological framings and take on new meanings, values, and configurations of power. I focus on power, knowledge, and healing, as three attributes that are associated with ayahuasca, and use this as an analytic to show that these attributes become unraveled and humanized as ayahuasca is recontextualized. However, new articulations and openings are also created as plants and humans, Shipibo healers and outsiders engage in new types of collaborative worldmaking practices.
Journal of Ethnobiology, 2024
Ethnobiology has long recognized that human and plant relationships produce particular ways of living. The discipline is increasingly asking how these lifeworlds reflect and create sociopolitical formations-from low-impact hunting-gathering or slash-and-burn agriculture, to colonial plantations and runaway settlements, to contemporary agribusiness and alternative biodynamic agriculture. In this special issue, we propose the concept plant-anthropo-genesis to highlight the ways in which plants and people are co-produced. We explore entanglements between plants and people over time, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic and historical research to offer new and critical insights into the ways that plant-human lifeworlds co-produce one another-from the processes of racialization in plantation societies to the aspirational interventions of gardeners, farmers, and scientists aiming for redemption from chemical industrial agriculture. The collection centers on acts of reciprocal human and botanical labor through a variety of contexts and perspectives in crop fields, including: how monocrops and plantations reshape socioecological life; ritual dimensions of plant-human interactions; and the regenerative alternatives that re-imagine plant-human relations and agro-ecological possibilities amid the historical weight of extractivist agriculture in plant-anthropo-worlds.