Plants and Humans in the Plaza Samper Mendoza, Bogotá: On Knowledge Reflexivity as Contact

Abstract

The Plaza Samper Mendoza in Bogotá is a market devoted exclusively to the trade of medicinal and ritual plants. In the Plaza, not only do the plants gather, but also the people who cultivate, collect, buy them, and prepare infusions and remedies with them. By studying the wide repertoire of relationships between plants and humans, this article challenges the modern dichotomy between plants and humans, this arti-cle challenges the modern dichotomy between subjects and objects of knowledge, according to which plants are always—and exclusively—the latter. In contrast, I argue that affective encounters are a matter of knowledge as contact. My argument unfolds through an ethnography that follows the practices by which human-plant bodies are produced. This way of doing ethnography allows me to situate knowledge itself as part of the encounters that intertwine humans and plants in the Plaza, in a joint becoming that frames the reflexivity of knowledge as a situational problem.