Vegetable Temporalities: Life cycles, maturation and death in an Amerindian ethnography

Abstract

This article considers how relations with certain plants produce multiple temporalities for the Wajãpi, an Amerindian people from the Brazilian Amazon. Inspired by a non-anthropocentric anthropology or an “anthropology beyond the human,” the article is an ethnographic exploration about how the Wajãpi perceive the concrete and sensible features of certain vegetable species, and thus how they see them as subjects, in a process that produces different space-times. I also show how certain concepts are central to this same process, specifically, that of life cycle and maturation (including death), which lead to notions of co-temporality and difference between groups and individuals.