Learning from a more-than-human perspective. Plants as teachers

Abstract

Modern philosophy have categorized the enlightened human as the exclusive holder of reason. The modern notion of learning established an unbridgeable gap between human ways of learning and those of “non-humans.” We assume that learning is a skill of all organisms and not an exclusively human prerogative. We prefer the “more-than-human” expression instead of “post-humanism.” The reason is to avoid the prefix “post” and its meaning, very often teleological, evolving beyond or surpassing what was left behind. Our argument comes from an empirical analysis of ritual practices of a neo-shamanic kind based on the power of plants, found in Brazilian urban settings. We started from an ecological cosmovision where learning is a movement of life.

KEYWORDS:

• indigenous peoples
• indigenous shamanism
• more-than-human
• Posthumanism
• power plants
• urban Shamanism

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Notes

1 This way of conceiving education and the formal system of education goes back to Modern pedagogy and its bases in Comenius’s Great Didactic, Rousseau’s “Emile” and the institution of a Christian school system (Comenius, 1907 [1657]; Rousseau, 1911/1762).

2 The New Age concept in religious studies has been defined as a kind of holistic spirituality, grounded in the sacralization of the Self, in harmony with nature and with the Cosmos. It is a hybrid spiritual movement (combining elements from diverse traditions, cultures and religions) that values intuition, altered states of consciousness and natural therapeutic techniques as a path to spiritual evolution, health and well-being (Steil, De La Torre, & Toniol, 2018).

3 We have chosen the literal translation of “plantas de poder”, as they are called in Portuguese by practitioners of urban shamanic rituals in Brazil, or “power plants” in English.

4 As Juan Scuro shows, the term entheogen is a neologism created to replace other terms like hallucinogen and psychedelic, used to designate psychoactive substances, but have a negative connotation. The term, which became popular since 1979, was invented by Carl Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott and Gordon Wasson, who gathered two words from the Greek: entheos (God within) and gen (to breed), combining in the term entheogen to express the experience induced by shamanic states and ecstatic trance when using these substances (Scuro, 2018, p. 87).

5 Here it is necessary to mention the ayahuasca churches that also use power plants, especially ayahuasca, but that, as shown by Labate and Coutinho (2014) and Moreira and MacRae (2011), have assumed an institutional format similar to Christian churches, with many of them, especially those in popular areas, becoming physically visible through their small temples. On the other hand, we can observe certain proximity between New Age groups and the mediumistic religions in terms of the characteristics of a certain invisibility of their places of worship.

6 The concept of “interface shamanism” was used by Capredon (2018), based on the proposition of Losonczy and Cappo (2013), in their ethnography of the Baniwa, an indigenous people of Northwest Amazonia, most of whose members converted to Evangelical Christianity in the mid-twentieth century. In the article, published in the Brazilian journal Horizontes Antropológicos, the author presents Baniwa shamanism as the expression of “interface shamanism” (Capredon, 2018).

7 Although reference is made here to the shamanism of originary indigenous communities, shamanic purity does not actually exist, given that no isolated indigenous communities exist. Modernity and globalization affect all peoples in such a way that neo-shamanic practices end up reverberating in the originary communities.

8 The names of the guardian and facilitator used here are fictitious.

9 The question of evolution as a mental and spiritual process is also the central theme of Bateson’s book Mind and Nature (1980).

10 Angels fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred results from the work of compilation and organization undertaken by Bateson’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, of the writings left by him before his death in Esalen, California (Bateson & Bateson, 2005).

11 In the book Angels fear, Bateson asks whether the thought of Descartes (1596–1650) could not be seen as the culminating point of a prolonged decline when compared to the scientific rigour and refinement of the thirteenth century in the West (Bateson & Bateson, 2005), especially the dualism of spirit and matter, the cogito and the Cartesian coordinates.

12 In the book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson (2000) defines each of these terms with reference to the distinction proposed by Jung. Pleroma refers to the non-living world that is undifferentiated by subjectivity and Creatura to the living world.

13 This allows Bateson to include “embryology,” understood by him as process through which the embryo achieves its differentiation and development in the evolutionary process (Bateson & Bateson, 2005).

Additional information

Funding

The authors were supported in this research by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, RS), Federal University of São Paulo (Sao Paulo, SP), and the Brazilian Federal Research Council (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológica, CNPq).