MovingHealingPlants · Moving healing plants: Epidemic histories and networks of care along the Amazon river

Epidemics involve the circulation not only of pathogens, animals and people, but also of healing plants. In a highly innovative approach, MovingHealingPlants explores human-plant-pathogen networks of care emerging in the exchange of healing plants used for epidemic diseases. The project engages a longue durée timeframe from colonial encounters to current urbanisation processes in Amazonia, and extends along the Amazon river axis connecting contemporary Amazonian cities of Manaus (Brazil), Leticia (Colombia) and Iquitos (Peru). With its headwaters in the Andes and flowing into the Atlantic coast, the highly navigated and populated Amazon river has been decisive in the history of medicine and public health in Amazonia and South America. Yet so far, historical accounts are fragmented into colonial or contemporary nation-states borders, or focus on specific diseases or institutions. This groundbreaking project proposes an interconnected fluvial account of the history of medicine and intercultural relationships of care, from the vantage point of the circulation and transformations of healing plants. Drawing from ethnobotany, global health, history, STS and anthropology, this project aims to assemble a history of epidemics and intercultural care in Amazonia, to explore cosmologies and technologies of plant transformations through ethnographic collaborative participatory approaches, and to produce a critical account of emergent networks and boundary dynamics in a field of Amazonian health simultaneously global and locally situated. MovingHealingPlants highlights the relationships Amazonian Indigenous people form with healing plants as persons, in a more-than-human cosmopolitics from where to rethink some of our most pressing anthropocenic predicaments: environmental destruction and urbanization, the emergence of infectious diseases, and the threats to Indigenous forest knowledge and modes of existing.