Hybrid Ethnobotanies in the Indigenous and AfroIndigenous Andean Pacific in Colombia

Keywords: hybrid ethnobotanies, AfroIndigenous, Indigenous, Colombia, Andean Pacific, intersectional, racial capitalism, place-specific autonomy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 45

Abstract

My fieldwork for my political ecological dissertation is an ethnography of Indigenous and AfroIndigenous ethnobotanical practices in four communities in Cauca, in the Andean Pacific region in the Western Amazon of Colombia. Through collaborative field work, including interviews and active participant observation, I documented the use of herbs and food as medicine, and agricultural and land tenure practices that depart significantly from those of agribusiness dominated by racial capitalism. These ethnobotanical practices recuperate precolonial and ancestral knowledge as some of many efforts to build community autonomy and self-determination in Colombia in the present day, as it fitfully enters the post-conflict period.

Through an intersectional and topographical analysis, I show both the hybrid commonalities and differences of Afro and Indigenous ethnobotanical practices and their importance place-making in maintaining their communities’ cultures, connections to the land, and relations to each other. Supplementing my field work with archival research, I locate these practices within a long genealogy of place-specific resistance to racial capitalism. I document and articulate three dialectical historical movements then - ancestral Indigenous knowledge and practices passed down to modern times, the historical and current constraints of racial capitalism from the colonial era to its current neo-imperialist forms, and the current hybrid ethnobotanical praxical knowledge that allows Indigenous and AfroIndigenous peoples to develop and maintain place-specific autonomy while profoundly questioning what development of places and our relationships to the rest of nature signify.