CRASSH | Decolonising Plant Knowledge Thinking about Rau

Introducing rau and its decolonising focus on plant knowledge Opening of seminar series by the 'Decolonising Plant Knowledge: Voices from Subverted Plant Worlds' research network. Further details: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/4... Speakers: Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology). Banu Subramaniam (Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, USA) Discussant: Barbara Bodenhorn (Pembroke College, Cambridge) About Rau Rau is a polysemic concept shared among Indigenous Western Amazonians to designate plants that confer power, knowledge, personhood and shamanic agency. Rau plants are transformative, serving as multifunctional medicines, poisons, and entheogens, while also providing food and building materials, whole or in parts. This interdisciplinary seminar series explores aspects of Rau as a crucible of creative epistemic frictions between botanical narratives and colonised plant worlds. Numerous scholars have examined the political frameworks and categories that have historically shaped botanical narratives and representations in empires. Still, the ‘colonisation of knowledge’, in its dialogical aspects, was never complete. Colonised people have maintained and even developed the polyvalence of their plants and plant knowledge in ways that further destabilise and enrich the categories imposed on them in the name of science. In a decolonising perspective, we are attentive to voices from plant worlds which colonisation has subverted in the past and, in new forms, continues to subvert. With a primary focus on Latin America yet open to comparison, we aim to address these voices in thematic, interdisciplinary seminars that gather researchers in person and online.