Nomadic Ecologies: Plants, embodied knowledge, and temporality in the Colombian Amazon

Abstract

A non-anthropocentric approach to human and other-than-human relations in the Colombian Amazon, this paper follows plant-human encounters in the context of the ritual use of coca(Quech. kuka; Lat. Erythroxylon coca) with a Murui indigenous elder. It describes how plants and humans co-create place-based knowledge, ecologies, and territories. The article also tackles some aspects of Amazonian socio-ecological life beyond teleological notions of time, change, and history. A conversation on plant-human relations, it suggests that questions of corporality, ingestion, and tactility, among others, might be of interest to decolonial theory.