Emilia Sanabria

Plants come with their worlds. Accord­ing to indigenous epistemologies, plants can be sentient beings, impart wisdom, have agency and intention. Various forms of care are extended to plants. They form part of kinship structures, and their genealogies may be entan­gled with those of the humans who domesticate and propagate them. Plant medicines like the psychoactive herbal brew Ayahuasca, used in collective rituals, remind us that encounters with others are essential to healing: encounters between patients and healers, encounters between humans and plants and colonial encounters. In her lecture, anthropologist Emilia Sanabria takes a look at the current global rise in Ayahuasca consumption and reflects on the importance of decolonizing our understandings of healing and of what (or who) plants are and do.