Disturbing Categories: Plants in Peru.

Even more than two months after my dissertation defense, there is one question from a reader that still niggles at me and has to do with our fundamental relationship to plants. The question asked me to reimagine the way I speak about plants - to break apart the framework that we use to understand our relationship to plant, and possibly revolutionize culture studies or to be specific film and lit studies. I was looking for that answer when I visited Peru this past June, and am still far away from answering it.

Two words cropped up in the defense. One, "tool," was mistakenly used by me as I searched for a better one. The second, "medium," was mentioned by a professor in German studies to describe one of the ways nature was integrated in poetry by the Romantics. As a "tool," the plants in stories become objects, instrumentalized and existing only for our purpose. I couldn't have stated it in a way I believe in less. As a "medium," the plant becomes a conduit for a message, an expression of another, but still less of an agent. And after writing so long about plants, I want to see and speak about plants as beings rather than tools or media. 

Yet, what is this other way of thinking?

True to my nature, the one museum I was excited about visiting concerned plants. The Plants of Cusco Museum (Museo de Plantas Sagradas, Mágicas, y Medicinales) uses the appeal of hallucinogenic and narcotic plants to draw in visitors.

The room on Ayahuasca brew (Banisteriopsis caapi vine and either leaves from Psychotria genus or Justicia pectoralis) did attempt to replicate the effects of the drug through an overlay of a jungle photograph with an image illustrating the hallucinations. According to the exhibit, the effect of the plant with the guidance of a shaman is to effectively reveal a second nature hidden to our sober senses.

With or without the help of a shaman, this experience is now available to Westerners and it becomes another item to be checked off the psychedelic bucket list.

The room on the role of the coca plant in Peruvian culture was far more educational as it traced a far more integral role of coca leaves than what is portrayed in popular media representations. Used in trading by indigenous peoples, the plant actually contributed to the health and well being of rural farmers by allowing them to obtain food otherwise inaccessible. The coca plant also had a social role as a ritualized greeting. The emphasis on cocaine trafficking rather than the medicinal properties and the cultural meaning of this plant has vastly reduced its significance for those of us who really only come to know the plant through its cultural distillations. Just as the coca plant is reduced to one alkaloid to produce cocaine, our North American understanding is limited to one perspective.

The tour guide at the Lima ruins was quite right to be proud of the plant and its availability in Peru. It's common to find coca tea, coca candy and coca chocolates in gift shops. Yet, this tourist version of the plant has once again limited it to a product.

The museum was about far more than just Ayahuasca and Coca. On one little table tucked away at the back, there were two heavy books on plants and their common usage. Many of the plants listed there were in the process of being studied and some of their traditional uses had been proved or disproved.

These books represented to me a relationship to the environment that can't be measured even as they spoke in quantitative language. The knowledge had been gathered over many generations and over many encounters and cannot be fully distilled into a book. The categorical breakdown of the plants according to measurable criteria was once again just one view of plant but once I reflected on the books, I saw a glimpse into an experiential relationship with plants between the categories.

It is best encapsulated by the differing relationship to plants between my mother-in-law and me. She can walk along the street and see who the plants are through her experience with them that is best described as familiarity. I count the points on the leaves and struggle to later identify them in a book.

To understand a plant, I wonder if the first step is not to experience it as living.