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ABSTRACT
Moving among the laboratory, the Brazilian Amazon, and herbaria, this article cultivates a theoretical grafting of phytocommunicable strategies that stem from human interactions with ayahuasca and Arabidopsis, two plants that appear – at least geographically – worlds apart. Ayahuasca, a psychedelic Amazonian vine, represents the ‘Philosopher Plant’, guiding imbibers to greater self-knowledge and facilitating embodiment across species divides. It also links Amazonian indigenous claims to land and political sovereignty through cultural patrimony. Arabidopsis, also known as the ‘Botanical Drosophila’ and ‘rat-plant’ for its role as an experimental organism, is a ‘scientist’s specimen’ in laboratory research. These two plants demonstrate different ways that humans think, interact and communicate with or about plants, shaping and shaped by different conceptions of ‘the human’ in relation to other organisms. I take a ‘rhizomatic’ approach to provide multiple modes of analytical entry to phytocommunicable models, arguing for a cross-pollination of ideas in fertilising futures of human-plant collaborative survival.
Acknowledgment
I wanted to thank Evan Hepler-Smith, Charles Briggs, and Becky Schulthies for their support in writing this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Sixteenth century German physician and botanist Johan Thal ‘discovered’ what he called Pilosella siliquosa in the Harz Mountains. Many plants discovered by roving male botanists often had a history of use by nearby humans. There is no reason to think otherwise of this little plant. Carl Linnaeus would rename the Pilosella as Arabidopsis thaliana, in honour of Thal.
2 In January 2019, China’s Chang’e-4 lander placed a small container of seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana and potatoes along with silkworm eggs on the moon. The experiment to see if the plants can successfully perform photosynthesis in a lunar environment entails the symbiotic relationship between the plants and silkworms. Letzter, Rafi (4 January 2019). There Are Plants and Animals on the Moon Now (Because of China). Space.com. Retrieved 15 January 2019.
3 Like many a psychedelic, sacred botanical, Ayahuasca can be misappropriated and misused. To try to write of plants in reductive form, particularly sacred ones like Ayahuasca, inevitably does an injustice to them and to their human counterparts who consider plants to be kin. And yet, I write in wavy lines on a digital screen about Ayahuasca and the Arabidopsis. I do so in the hopes of demonstrating different forms of human-plant communication and the kinds of knowledge seeded in these interactions.
4 Interview conducted April 2011.
5 ‘Mais que amigo, mais que irmão’.
6 Interview conducted May 1, 2011.
7 Interview conducted July 12, 2011.
8 ‘A nossa ciência tem muito valor, porque a gente sobreviveu até hoje dela, quem ensinou a gente a fazer o fogo, a roupa, o artesanato, quem ensinou o poder da cura, a conhecer a medicina. A gente não tinha esses contatos e já sabíamos fazer tudo isso’.
9 With the current right-wing administration cutting off social welfare programmes and curtailing the social medicine and ethnic recognition programmes that began when the dictatorship ended in 1985, the Kuntanawá still do not have their territorial claims realised.
10 Fieldwork conducted in Geneva in 2008 at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the 2017 documents on ‘Matters Concerning the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore’ designing the 2018–2019 schedule of negotiations.
11 Conversations in archives, January 27, 2017.
13 Email exchanges with Michael Schmidlehner April 2014 and July 2018. http://amazonlink.org/aldeiasvigilantes/site/apresenta.php (last accessed 6/30/18).
14 Programa Nacional do Patrimônio Imaterial – PNPI.
15 Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico Nacional – IPHAN.
17 Conversations and communications with Malú Ochoa, May 2017, July 2017 and May 20, 2018.
18 Dos Santos et al. (Citation2015).
19 Wild [Savage] News is a documentary project by filmmaker Nilson Tuwe of the Huni Kuin people. [Nilson] Tuwe lives on the Indigenous Lands of the Humaitá River, near to a group of isolated tribes. Engaged in the quest for solutions to protect these tribes, this film takes a sensitive approach to problematise and convey an indigenous point of view about these ‘wild relatives’. Yuxiã is a documentary filmed in the village of São (Saint) Vicente, collects the voices of the elders about the ‘yuxiã’ or spirits, and the way that shamans have worked with these forces since ancient times to perform healing. The documentary also recreates the history of the emergence of the Huni Kuin people’s sacred medicine.*