Plant Agency in the Guianas: Attraction, Assault, and Animacy

Among Indigenous peoples in the Guianas, including the Makushi, Pemon, and Karinya, certain plants are regarded as animate, agentive beings—plant persons—that can act independently or in concert with humans. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival records, the article describes how these plants exert agency in contexts of subsistence, shamanism, assault sorcery, and romantic attraction, as well as within extractive frontiers such as mining, forestry, and plantation agriculture. The authors argue that these botanical agencies shape relationships between humans and plants, raising questions about how plant persons are positioned across different practices and how they interact with shamans, sorcerers, hunters, gardeners, and miners.

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Abstract

This article uses ethnographic and ethnobotanical methods to examine relationships between animate and agentive plants and human beings among the Makushi, Pemon, Karinya, and other Indigenous and mixed-Indigenous peoples in the Guianas. It considers representations of these plants and related ontologies in the archival record and contrasts these accounts with more recent ethnographic descriptions based on the authors’ fieldwork across Guyana and Venezuela. It thinks about these plants as agentive beings (with regard to animist ontologies and sometimes physical properties) within a variety of contexts. Today, the territories of these Indigenous peoples tessellate with extractive frontiers, which center around gold, diamond, and bauxite mining, as well as oil prospecting, forestry, and plantation agriculture. In this context, these plants emerge as active and animate agents. They also emerge as such agents in contexts of subsistence, shamanism, and assault sorcery, as well as sexual and romantic attraction, which can act with or without human impetus. The question arises as to the nature of the relationships between such plants and their users, for example, shamans ( piaimen ), assault sorcerers ( kanaima ), hunters, gardeners, and miners, within a variety of contexts. Based on the authors’ long-term fieldwork, the article examines animate plants and argues that they evince special botanical agencies among the Indigenous communities with whom the authors have worked in the Guianas. How are animate plants positioned within these practices and contexts? And how do they exert agency therein as plant persons?