Daniel Zohar

Ethnographies from Amazonia and beyond show that many Indigenous groups maintain social and kinship relations with plants and other nonhumans 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. It aims to integrate two anthropological debates that have 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 economic and political level (e.g., as they become commodities). Based on two months of previous preliminary fieldwork and an additional 18 months of multispecies ethnography among the Ecuadorian Achuar and the plants cohabiting with them, this study will trace the material, ontological, and technological processes through which plants move along the subject-object continuum. In addition to analyzing everyday and ritual 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, it will contribute to the analysis of Indigenous political ontologies, environmental sustainability, and multispecies justice in the context of the Anthropocene and the global climate crisis.