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Paper short abstract

The aim of the paper is to explore possibilities of including more-than-human beings, namely medicinal plants in anthropological analysis and ethnographic research located in Indigenous Peruvian Amazon. I combine hybrid methods and theories from the field of semiotics, ethnobotany, ontological turn.

Paper long abstract

When considering humans and their societies, anthropologists should not omit the importance of plants, which co-habit and co-produce relational eco-cosmos with people, and which also create their own (social) relationships with other entities, leading to the emergence of more-than-human entanglements and dialogues. Drawing on ‘anthropology beyond humanity’ (Ingold, 2013), anthropologists can not only include non-human beings in ethnographic research, but should also try to take them seriously, as equal protagonists or ‘interlocutors’. However, this raises the question of how – as anthropologists – can we explore multi-species links that elude conventional ethnographic methods, and exceed Western ontological and epistemic frameworks. Preparing for the first fieldwork in Amazon rainforest in August 2026, this paper addresses considerations on overlap between anthropology and botany in the context of Indigenous ontology (animism) and academic epistemic frameworks. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to explore possibilities of including more-than-human beings, namely medicinal plants, in anthropological analysis and ethnographic research located in Peruvian Amazon. As an aspiring ethnobotanist I have been participating in tree different botanic courses, to comprehend non-human participants of my study more profoundly. Therefore, in my work I combine hybrid research methods and methods of analysis, including theories from semiotics, ethnobotany, pharmacology, embedding them in ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis. As a theoretical framework I adopt current non-anthropocentric approach (e.g. posthumanism, new materialism), although I notice frequent incompatibility of these to field realities. Drawing on ethnographic findings, I perceive a possibility to use idea of quantum superposition for analyzing plants' ontological instability.