Journal of Ethnobiology

This article uses ethnographic and ethnobotanical methods to examine relationships between animate and agentive plants and human beings among the Makushi, Pemon, Karinya, and other Indigenous and mixed-Indigenous peoples in the Guianas. It considers representations of these plants and related ontologies in the archival record and contrasts these accounts with more recent ethnographic descriptions based on the authors’ fieldwork across Guyana and Venezuela. It thinks about these plants as agentive beings (with regard to animist ontologies and sometimes physical properties) within a variety of contexts. Today, the territories of these Indigenous peoples tessellate with extractive frontiers, which center around gold, diamond, and bauxite mining, as well as oil prospecting, forestry, and plantation agriculture. In this context, these plants emerge as active and animate agents. They also emerge as such agents in contexts of subsistence, shamanism, and assault sorcery, as well as sexual and romantic attraction, which can act with or without human impetus. The question arises as to the nature of the relationships between such plants and their users, for example, shamans (piaimen), assault sorcerers (kanaima), hunters, gardeners, and miners, within a variety of contexts. Based on the authors’ long-term fieldwork, the article examines animate plants and argues that they evince special botanical agencies among the Indigenous communities with whom the authors have worked in the Guianas. How are animate plants positioned within these practices and contexts? And how do they exert agency therein as plant persons?

This paper explores the intricate relationship between humans and plants from the perspective of Salish concepts, shedding light on the tradition of attributing human-desired qualities to the botanical world. Although plants possess traits that appeal to human desires, it is essential to recognize their inherent distinction from humans. Through historical utilization by Salish communities, a spiritual reciprocal bond has been established, necessitating the adherence to human-like protocols to maintain a symbiotic relationship. However, this exploration advocates against romanticizing this relationship, as it has the potential to foster internal stereotyping while leading to external discrepancies in philosophical pursuits. By carefully examining Salish practices from past to present, an emphasis is placed on the significance of comprehending and respecting the uniqueness of plant life. Through this analysis, the primary goal is to enhance our understanding of the profound connection between humans and plants while embracing the authenticity and complexity of this relationship. Appreciating the true nature of the bond can offer valuable insights into sustainable coexistence with the botanical world and contribute to fostering a more balanced and respectful relationship between humans and the natural environment.

Southwestern Amazonia is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world. In this region, plants have a significant place and role in Indigenous peoples’ social relations. They are inseparable actors in human history and crucial social actors within diverse social assemblages. Our article focuses on plant subjectivities in Apurinã ritual encounters, which highlight the elemental role of certain plants in complex relations of various more-than-human and human beings. In the kyynyry and kamatxi rituals of this Arawak-speaking nation living in the Purus River region, the plants are central ritual actors and manifest in immaterial and material ways: they are entities, have their own songs, and are embodied, danced with, and experienced through diverse audible dimensions. Our sources, produced by participative workshops, interviews, co-living with our interlocutors, as well as our own participation in ritual encounters, show how plants are considered to be constituted as relational agents. The plants are identified and known through their relationships, qualities, and the production of multibeings. They follow the same moiety lines as the Apurinã, but some plants become more important than others. Plants reveal varying degrees of relative agentive potency depending on their relationship to other beings, and the role in the life-making of humans, animals, plants, and other more-than-human beings. Furthermore, our community-based approach also points to the development of specific systems of communication, such as in the form of plant instruments’ sounds, storying, and sharing experiences of living with plants.

In Indigenous Amazonian life-worlds, plants used for diverse purposes such as protecting, harming, seducing and curing are sometimes considered to be ‘plant persons’, imbued with special kinds of subjectivity. In examining plant animism in Amazonia, we consider case studies of the knowledge and use of toxic, medicinal and charm plants from two distinctive societies – the Makushi people of Guyana (Daly) and the Matsigenka of Peru (Shepard). We have focused on the chemosensory modes of communication (taste, odour, texture, etc.) that shape Makushi and Matsigenka interactions with plants, with a particular emphasis on bitterness, causticity and other toxic properties that often embody a plant's power to heal or harm. Here, we delve deeper into Makushi understandings and uses of shamanic plants within the category of bina ‘charms’, exploring how their animacy is entangled with chemosensory properties, phytochemical components and modes of preparation and administration. We also revisit Matsigenka knowledge, concepts and uses of various bamboo species, revealing a complex interpenetration between tactile and chemical perceptions, phenological cycles and eco-cosmological elaborations. Using these cross-cultural examples, we show plant animacy can be expressed through sensorial and ecosemiotic processes of embodiment and ensoulment which defy Cartesian mind/body, nature/culture and subject/object dualisms. In order to fully comprehend plants, we suggest a deeper engagement between anthropology and the natural sciences. Indigenous perspectives on plant animacy raise far-reaching questions about the meanings of body, soul and non-human agency in Indigenous Amazonia, contributing to the relevance of anthropology and ethnobiology in the critical context of the Anthropocene.

Since they were first contacted in the early 1960s, the Yaminawa people of Comunidad Nativa de Raya (Mapuya River, Peruvian Amazon) have been involved in the timber exploitation industry. Over the following decades, most of the Raya men were recruited to locate, cut, and transport valuable timber resources in the forest and even to become minor bosses within the habilitación system. This seems, in some way, contradictory with their sociocosmology that shares perspectival features with those of other Amerindians. Certain animals and plants have agency, desires, and habits analogous to humans and play a central role in the process of the social fabrication of persons. I focus here on some species of large trees and their ontology. Their relationship with human beings should be characterized as ambivalent. On the one hand, they have an intense predatory agency; on the other, they are the source of shamanic power. On the basis of this conception of the vegetal world, I explore the transformation of ideas about the agency of trees in recent decades, which occurred in interaction with the cosmology of the regional society, and enquire about how the Yaminawa people articulate the existence of these predatory human-like tree entities with their, also predatory, involvement in the timber industry.

In this paper, we explore Bahnar perspectives on the agency of plants and forest, and human–forest relations in Vietnam. The Bahnar are among Vietnam's 54 recognized ethnic minority peoples ¹ , many of whom live in proximity to the forest, gather its resources, and regard it as a spiritual abode in their cosmology. The Bahnar (Ba Na) people who inhabit the Central Highlands and are the main focus of this article have traditionally relied on the forest for subsistence, practising swidden cultivation, hunting birds and mammals, and gathering plants. Their forest knowledge is transmitted primarily orally; through the lexicon, everyday discourses, stories, and songs. It is acquired through participation in forest-related activities and informal learning of arts such as vernacular architecture, basketry, canoe-building, and textiles. The Bahnar see spirits in things in nature with which they have a connection or routine interactions (stones, streams, and trees) but not in everything. The Bahnar spiritual connection with the forest also guides their husbandry of increasingly scarce forest resources, such as rattan used in basketry, and large trees needed to make canoes. Certain plants and trees are protected by taboos, and certain parts of the forest are considered sacred, inhabited by gods and spirits, and not to be touched. Forests possess animacy for the Bahnar in that they are sensitive and responsive to a wide range of human behaviours, and must be treated with respect and care. This human–forest–spirit relationship is the primary lens through which the Bahnar perceive nature, and guides their daily interactions with it.

We adopt an ethnolinguistic approach to examine cultural practices involving trees in two Indigenous communities: the Ngarinyin Aborigines of Australia and the Solega/Soliga of India. On the basis of two separate types of data and methods, we demonstrate that the lives of the Ngarinyin and Solega are intimately connected with the trees surrounding them. Mentions of trees in Ngarinyin creation narratives are numerous and varied and show that trees perform specific functions in the narrative. They display various degrees of agency but are rarely represented as entirely passive objects. From signaling the specific location of a scene (similar to the “placehood” of trees attested elsewhere) to signaling clan affiliations, or even as a source for, e.g., spears, trees in stories engage actively with the (other) protagonists. Data from Solega ethnographic interviews also reveals the local importance of trees: individual trees may be given proper names, tree names often appear in place names, and at least one very ancient tree is worshipped as a deity. The latter is the result of an association of the tree with the Hindu god Shiva, which echoes the commonly observed reverence for trees associated with divine beings in the rest of India. Our findings tie in with the observations about the roles of trees in Indigenous cultures, who highlight the animacy of trees.

What can humans learn from plants in this time of widely perceived ecological disruption? And how can concepts drawn from ethnobotanical and ethnobiological inquiry help to guide understanding of interspecies relations in this historical moment? This essay departs from these basic questions by centering five key concepts derived from contemporary social theory for examining human understanding of plant lifeworlds: translation, equivocation, refusal, animacy, and agency. In doing so, it makes the case for how these concepts can invite ethnobiologists and ethnobotanists to question what we think we know about human–plant relations and the broader worlds that we collectively constitute.