Rooted Bonds: Human-Plant Kinship With Indigenous Peoples in the Amazonia

Abstract

As the Anthropocene epoch unfolds, humans must reckon with rapid environmental and climatic changes that endanger many peoples and life forms worldwide. To contend with these threatening events, anthropology has begun redefining perspectives that recognize nonhuman actors as having agency. This shift in perspective to reconsider what makes us human and our engagement with the living world can guide us to better understand how to form caring and nurturing relationships with our living environment. Anthropological thinkers should consider the role of nonhuman beings in their studies. This includes examining how intimacy, care, and kinship are formed among human and nonhuman actors. Moving away from binary views of biological and nonbiological kinship, known as fictive kinship, will make more space to form multispecies relationships with important living creatures we have historically, and politically, divorced ourselves from.