Smoking as Communication in Rastafari: Reasonings with ‘Professional’ Smokers and ‘Plant Teachers’
Ethnos June 10, 2019 Anna Waldstein 11 citations
Among Rastafari in England, smoking cannabis and tobacco is a professional activity that demonstrates dedication to the movement, aids in learning dialects, and enables communication with herbs as a 'plant teacher'—a natural divinatory mechanism providing esoteric knowledge to skilled adepts. This ethnographic research shows that smoking rituals facilitate multispecies communication between professional smokers and plant teachers, recasting agency in anthropological studies of smoking and deepening understanding of consciousness and intentionality in both humans and plants.