In Addis Ababa, a controversial ritual exorcises Protestant spirits from Ethiopian Orthodox hosts, aiming to draw sharp boundaries between Protestantism and Orthodoxy during a period of religious liberalization. The expulsion reaffirms local Orthodoxy as central to Ethiopian identity, portraying Protestantism as a foreign religion conflicting with the country's ancient Orthodox history. Yet the ritual is marked by profound ambiguities: its means, aesthetics, and themes suspiciously resemble those of Protestantism. Rather than ordering clear distinctions, the exorcism publicly exposes and magnifies the irreparable permeability of the inter-religious boundaries it seeks to demarcate, becoming a hazardous event that balances on the edge of becoming the other.
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.
This article examines how humans communicate with and about two seemingly disparate plants—ayahuasca, a psychedelic Amazonian vine, and Arabidopsis, a common laboratory model organism. Ayahuasca is portrayed as a 'Philosopher Plant' that enables self-knowledge and cross-species embodiment, while also supporting Amazonian indigenous claims to land and sovereignty. Arabidopsis, known as the 'Botanical Drosophila,' serves as a standardized experimental organism in scientific research. The author uses a 'rhizomatic' approach to argue that these different modes of human-plant interaction reveal varied conceptions of 'the human' and suggest that cross-pollinating ideas from both contexts can foster collaborative survival between humans and plants.