More than Weeds (2020-2026)

Abstract: Across the Amazon, medicinal plants and their associated Indigenous medicinal knowledge-practices have become increasingly abstracted and extracted as resources. In the Peruvian Amazon in particular, this has manifested in the form of a booming local and transregional Ayahuasca tourism industry. For many local Indigenous communities, however, whose medicinal plants and knowledge-practices are circulating in the global marketplace, this trend represents a neocolonial “spiritual extractivism”. Accordingly, Indigenous medicinal knowledge-practices, such as Shipibo-Konibo everyday herbalism, have become politicized and mobilized as “anti-colonialist forms of practice and knowledge” (Coshikox and ASOMASHK 2018).

 

In this doctoral research, I seek to explore this politicization and follow people and plants in their interspecies worldmaking practices in terrains of power. By tracing the sociopolitical and socioecological processes that shape everyday herbalism, I will probe how human-plant collaborations become embedded within struggles for decolonization and sociopolitical self-determination in response to an extractive-capitalist Ayahuasca tourism.

 

More specifically, by integrating a political ontology with a posthumanist political ecology approach, I examine how everyday herbalism as a network of intersubjective, material-semiotic relations generates an ontological politics that seeks to counter the configurations of human/more-than-human relations enacted in a modern/colonial, extractive-capitalist market economy.

 

My research thereby examines the politicization of Shipibo-Konibo everyday herbalism in two entangled folds of local and global: by considering the social ontology that configures my fieldwork site as well as the larger ontological frictions highlighted by an extractive-capitalist market economy, I will trace how these two levels entangle and remake herbalism into an onto-political mode of resistance.

 

Keywords: herbalism – human/more-than-human relations – spiritual extractivism – political ontology – material-semiotics – posthumanist political ecology – multispecies ethnography 

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This research project has been awarded with the Ph.D. Scholarship Grant of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.