Daniel Zohar – Whitten Research Fund 2024-25
Daniel Zohar
London School of Economics
Winner of the Norm and Sibby Whitten Research Fund 2024-2025
Growing Agency: The Transformation of Plant Subjectivity in Amazonia in the Anthropocene
Ethnographies from Amazonia and beyond show that many Indigenous groups maintain social and kinship relations with plants, animals, and other beings understood to possess personhood and sociality. Drawing on posthumanist and multispecies frameworks, this study examines how plants perceived as subjects might transform into objects, and vice versa. Specifically, it aims to integrate two anthropological debates that have traditionally developed separately: one explores what happens when plant-persons undergo transformations at the everyday level (as they become food and artifacts), while the other focuses on the macro, political, and economic level (e.g., as they become commodities). Based on two months of previous preliminary fieldwork and an additional 22 months of multispecies ethnography among the Ecuadorian Achuar and the plants cohabiting with them, this study will trace the material and technological processes through which plants move along the subject-object continuum. In addition to analyzing everyday human-plant interactions, the research will explore how the Achuar, hunters and horticulturalists who have shifted traditional gardening methods to commercial purposes, commodify forest ungurahua palms (Oenocarpus bataua) for cosmetics. In doing so, this study will further contribute to the analysis of Indigenous political ontologies, environmental sustainability, and multispecies justice in the context of the global climate crisis.
