"Not Just Plants, but Also Plants": A Political Ontology of Pohã Ñana, the Medicinal Plants of the Guarani-Kaiowá

This article explores the political ontology of the Guarani-Kaiowá, Indigenous people of today’s Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil, and their medicinal plants, pohã ñana. The contention, articulated by a Brazilian public health research team, that these plants are ‘not just plants, but also plants’ is investigated and traced back to cosmology. The inseparability of cosmology, ontology, epistemology and practices in relation to medicinal plants and the Guarani-Kaiowá is demonstrated and presented as 'storied performativity' (Blaser 2014). The article shows how the political ontology of the Guarani-Kaiowá is shaped by their resistance against agribusiness development in Indigenous lands and forests, along with their struggle to realise a cosmo-political life, which includes medicinal plants found (and lost) in the forests that have become monoculture. Medicinal plants and associated knowledge and practices have thus become important features of their resistance and political ontology. The article also reviews recent collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers regarding these knowledges and practices that attempt to bring Indigenous knowledge and politics into dialogue with Western epistemology, an important challenge for the harmonious co-existence of multiple ontologies, otherwise conceptualised as the ‘pluriverse’. Blaser’s political ontology framework helps to reveal the multiple dimensions to this Indigenous ontology.