Plant-human relations in Latin America and the ‘ontological turn’

Plant Human Relationships 

Francoise Barbira Freedman

From Mexico to Patagonia, Amerindian plant and human interactions have been central to sophisticated forms of managing biodiversity and resilience in the face of a colonial and postcolonial plantation economy in Latin America. Are there socio-cultural commonalities that might explain the high value generally attributed to plants for their multiple economic uses and as ways of knowing and experiencing the world? 

Recent post-humanist studies of “plant worlds” have provoked a re-evaluation of plant-human ties in Latin America from antiquity. Beyond the Anthropocene, this seminar critically examines continuities, ruptures, exchanges, and miscommunication associated with concepts of nature and science, commodification, conservation, and rights.  

Three areas in which interdisciplinary research has contributed to new understandings are presented and provide discussion topics.  

  • Scientific research has vindicated Indigenous plant knowledge in many ways. From sixteenth-century codices in Mexico to the ongoing search for New World drugs, plants from Latin America have transformed both practices and understandings in medicine (Schiebinger 2007). Recent appraisals of nineteenth-century naturalists, particularly Humboldt, have been instrumental in rethinking local knowledge. Amerindian understandings of plant classification have contributed to questioning Linnean classification and Darwinian evolution.  

  • Understanding plant-human relations beyond the texts of chroniclers, naturalists, travellers, and anthropologists requires a de-colonising approach to onto-epistemologies which have intrigued colonists since the Spanish Conquest. Cultural critiques (Mignolo 2018, Escobar 2020) and recent ethnographies in Central America, Amazonia and the Andes have shown the de-centrality of humans in local ‘botanical ontologies’ (Miller, Pigott). Taking a multi-culturalist stance shared by various national constitutions, how can radically divergent human-plant life worlds cohabit in a post-colonial ontological “pluriverse”? Some anthropologists (Kohn, 2013) have asked how plants/forests might perceive—even conceive- their worlds and human beings. 

  • Ontological preoccupations are seductive, but they may hide knowledge wars centred on ‘conservation’ and the ‘politics of nature’.  While historical ecologists rally to concepts of changing human-plant ‘meshworks’ (Ingold) in anthropogenic forests, conservation raises unresolved issues around property rights and exclusion of plant users.  Examples of tentative networks and initiatives to bridge conceptual divides in conservation practice highlight the contribution of bio-cultural diversity and involving Indigenous people in resource management (Nemonte 2024, Oliveira 2021). Urban market stalls and backyard gardens show strategies for urban migrants and displaced people to salvage plant-human interactions that are vital to them. 

Readings 

  • De L.T. Oliveira. 2021. Political ecology of soybean in South America. Routledge. 

  • Miller, Theresa L. 2019. Plant Kin, A Multi-Species Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. University of Texas Press. 

  • Nemonte, Nenquimo and M. Anderson. 2024. We Will Not Be Saved: A memoir of hope and resistance in the Amazon rainforest. Hachette UK. 

  • Schiebinger, Londa. 2007. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press 

  • Wulf, Andrea. 2016. The Invention of Nature. The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science. John Murray Press. 

  • Wylie, Leslie. 2023. Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics. Liverpool University Press. 

Note: Consult the complete bibliography in the University's Online Reading Lists here.