(Re)Generative Equivocations in the Creation of a "Medicinal Forest Garden"

• In Event: Methods of Engagement: Feminist Approaches to Collaborations in Studying Beyond the Human

Abstract

Gardens have been touted as especially well-suited places to explore how humans and plants become entwined in relations of care and placemaking (e.g. Myers 2017, Hartigan 2015). In a Shipibo community in the Peruvian Amazon, a participatory research process I initiated in 2017 has led to a multispecies and multicultural co-creation of a community medicinal forest garden. However, during the planning process, I realized that there were divergent understandings of “garden”, "forest", and "plants" at play, whose differences have become generative areas of inquiry. I adopt a cosmopolitical framework (Stengers 1999) that views these tensions as reflective of the multiple worlds we constitute relationally through our practices (e.g. Blaser and de la Cadena 2018). Thus, activities with plants in places called “gardens” are not just placemaking, but world-making, and the worlds each of us dwell in do not always share meanings or reference points. I have studied human-plant relations through methods including multispecies ethnography, indigenous practices of plant dieting, ethnobotanical interviews, ecological measurements, and community-based participatory research. In this paper, I explore the ways in which these varied methods operate in conversation with each other to become regenerative – continually making and unmaking both myself as researcher, and the more-than-human communities with whom I work. In the process, knowledge seems to become dispersed in the ensuing interspecies entanglements, and appears less something that can be attained, decided on, or pointed to and more something to be lived relationally through attentive practices of holding and working with ontological tensions.

Author

• Laura L Dev, University of California Berkeley