Presentation short abstract

Amazonian Shipibo healing practices take place in a sensorial terrain, unfolding through plant-human entwinements that blur boundaries between self and other and destabilize hierarchies of knowing. Through these embodied relations, healing can become a form of ontological resistance.

Presentation long abstract

Healing with medicinal plants is a sensory experience that unfolds within interspecies entwinements that blur boundaries between human and plant, self and other. My understanding of healing emerges from Amazonian Shipibo healing practices in which plants, spirits, and human bodies co-produce more-than-human worlds through song, psychedelic perception, dreams, and relational entwinement. Indigenous practices for learning from plants rely on periods of sensory deprivation to come into relationship with medicinal plants in a way that can permanently alter the human, opening the body to connections that traverse and destabilize colonial hierarchies of animacy and knowing. Yet, Shipibo healing rituals have become commodified and enfolded into global capitalism with the rise of ayahuasca tourism, an industry that increasingly extracts plant vitality and Indigenous knowledge from the Amazon to serve foreigners from the Global North.

I explore the ways in which the embodied, sensory, and psychoactive aspects of knowing plants continually make and unmake both myself as researcher and the more-than-human communities with whom I work. Capitalist ideologies tend to reduce plants to commodities and humans to laboring bodies. However, I argue that interspecies entwinements can create a sensorial terrain through which healing can become a form of political and ontological resistance, generating openings for mobilizing emergent more-than-human collectives and collaborations. This depends on what I call an ethic of healing. Healing, as an ethical and transformative engagement with more-than-human worlds, becomes a mode of relational worldmaking oriented toward reparation and accountable relations within an animate pluriverse.