Becoming-Plant; Living entanglements in Indian Ocean worlds and in Amazonia
Perceiving a medicine, a remedy or a drug as an object able to heal or harm in causal logic is possible from an external positioning. Should we place ourselves in the middle of things, or between the human and the non-human in the life-arrangement emerging between the two, there is no longer an object or a subject, but there is becoming. This is the place that many shamans and healers occupy to know how to heal with plants, some of these plants commonly called a "drug" or a "psychotropic drug" when recognized according to their biopharmaceutical or biomolecular properties. In this article, I aim to show how healers’ horizontal approach in the Indian Ocean area and in Amazonia can be better understood through a rhizomatic phenomenological approach than through a genealogical approach thinking though the tree as is generally done in current scientific approaches. Three case studies respectively show how becoming-plant is done through movement/rest, dream and affect. The rhizomatic phenomenological approach in anthropology here proposed, and which borrows in part from Deleuze & Guattari (1980), helps to understand how it is possible to entertain fortuitous relations with plants. Such an approach invites to privilege knowledge obtained through proximities rather than to adopt a perspective through external distance typical of the laboratory that extrapolates a plant from its contexts, even of itself, usually with interests in a sole molecule from the plant rather then in it’s synergies activated in-life.