The plants are always speaking: Extended multispecies liminality through dieta

Eleven maestros from five indigenous groups across the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon describe their plant relationships as literal communication: "It was the plants that told us." Based on over a decade of fieldwork including multiple dietas with teacher plants and approximately 200 ayahuasca ceremonies, the author proposes extended multispecies liminality—a permanent state of plant-human co-habitation produced through dieta, altered states ceremony, and sonic integration. The first in-depth ethnographic account of chiric sanango (Brunfelsia chiricaspi) dieta shows that apprenticeship dietas produce lasting somatic, perceptual, and dietary transformations persisting years beyond formal conclusion. This challenges representationalist approaches by insisting these practices are actual technologies with concrete inter-species effects, not symbolic performances of cosmological belief.

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Abstract

"It was the plants that told us” is what eleven maestros from five indigenous groups across the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon have told me over a decade and twenty-seven months of fieldwork. This article takes that statement seriously as an empirical description of inter-species communication. Drawing on intensive apprenticeship including multiple dietas with Amazonian teacher plants and approximately 200 ayahuasca ceremonies, I propose the concept of extended multispecies liminality: a permanent state of plant-human co-habitation produced through the ritual technologies of dieta, altered states ceremony, and sonic integration. Through what is, to my knowledge, the first in-depth ethnographic account of chiric sanango (Brunfelsia chiricaspi) dieta, I present evidence that apprenticeship dietas produce lasting somatic, perceptual, and dietary transformations that persist years beyond formal dieta conclusion. Extended multispecies liminality extends van Gennep and Turner's foundational ritual theory by demonstrating that liminality need not resolve. It extends multispecies ethnography by documenting not relations across species boundaries but their permanent dissolution. And it challenges representationalist approaches to ritual by insisting that the practices documented here constitute actual technologies with concrete inter-species effects, not symbolic performances of cosmological belief.