How Religion, Race, and the Weedy Agency of Plants Shape Amazonian Home Gardens

Introduction

Kawa situates this study at the intersection of ethnobotany and anthropology ‘‘beyond the human’’, arguing that research should consider both how people relate to plants and how plants actively engage with people. Earlier work in Amazonia has documented widespread management of useful plants in home gardens and shown that a substantial fraction have magico-medicinal uses; yet religious responses to those plants vary, with some Evangelical Christians openly criticising their use as incompatible with Christian belief while Amazonian folk Catholics maintain syncretic practices that borrow from Afro-Brazilian and indigenous traditions. This article sets out to integrate those anthropocentric and plant-centred perspectives by presenting ethnographic observations from Borba, Amazonas. Kawa aims to document divergent attitudes toward magico-medicinal plants across religious groups and to show how the biological tendency of many such species to behave as ‘‘weedy’’ colonisers shapes their persistence in domestic spaces, thus complicating efforts by some residents to distance themselves from these plants and their associated cultural histories.