Relational Plants and Apurinã's Multibeing Life-Making

Southwestern Amazonia is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world. In this region, plants have a significant place and role in Indigenous peoples’ social relations. They are inseparable actors in human history and crucial social actors within diverse social assemblages. Our article focuses on plant subjectivities in Apurinã ritual encounters, which highlight the elemental role of certain plants in complex relations of various more-than-human and human beings. In the kyynyry and kamatxi rituals of this Arawak-speaking nation living in the Purus River region, the plants are central ritual actors and manifest in immaterial and material ways: they are entities, have their own songs, and are embodied, danced with, and experienced through diverse audible dimensions. Our sources, produced by participative workshops, interviews, co-living with our interlocutors, as well as our own participation in ritual encounters, show how plants are considered to be constituted as relational agents. The plants are identified and known through their relationships, qualities, and the production of multibeings. They follow the same moiety lines as the Apurinã, but some plants become more important than others. Plants reveal varying degrees of relative agentive potency depending on their relationship to other beings, and the role in the life-making of humans, animals, plants, and other more-than-human beings. Furthermore, our community-based approach also points to the development of specific systems of communication, such as in the form of plant instruments’ sounds, storying, and sharing experiences of living with plants.