“We Come From Trees”

Abstract

This paper explores the pervasive role of plants in the lives of the Jotï, a group of 900 people from the Venezuelan Guayana. In contrast with other Amazonian people for whom plants play relatively minor roles in spiritual spheres when compared to animals (e.g., the Ese Eje, Aguaruna or Yanomami), among the Jotï plants pervade their religious universe, assuming fundamental and polysemic dimensions. Plants constitute active agents in Jotï biological, cultural, and spiritual production and reproduction. Plants are prominent within all aspect of Jotï society making it difficult to establish strict separations between subsistence and ideological spheres. This question is explored here using a broad concept of Religion including four interrelated concerns: protology, anthropogony, ecogony and eschatology. Embedded in this text are three aspects: (1) the contemporaneity of phyto-myths in daily lives; (2) the centrality of plants in the fabrication of humanity; and, (3) the relationship of the phyto-world to what Amazonian scholars refer to as “the symbolic economy of alterity”.