‘I am Apple’: relationships of the flesh. Exploring the corporeal entanglements of eating plants in the Amazon

Attala, Luci (2019) ‘I am Apple’: relationships of the flesh. Exploring the corporeal entanglements of eating plants in the Amazon. In: Body Matters: Exploring the Materiality of the Body. Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology Series . University of Wales Press, Cardiff, pp. 48-78. ISBN 9781786834157

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Abstract

This chapter uses a New Materialities (hereafter NM) approach to think about the corporeal consequences of eating plants. The aim is to encourage the reader to recognize the many active and formative material entanglements that articulate our lives. Typically positioned as an activity that is primarily self-interested and instinctual, eating is redefined here as a mutually influential co-productive relationship that is, in part, driven and shaped by the capacities of the engaging materials as they meld together through digestion. The title of this chapter playfully pokes at the paper ‘I eat an apple’ by Mol (2008) that focused its attentions on the ‘I’ (or the human view) of eating. This is done with a view to draw discussions away from attending exclusively to the eater in a bid to remind ourselves that eating is a process of becoming-with what is eaten. Therefore, using digestion as the process and the stomach as the location where edible substances blend, this approach recognizes not only the fundamental materiality of the body but also that the bodies of eaters materially bind with the bodies they ingest. Any notion that you are anything other than what you incorporate as flesh should fall away. Adopting this perspective attends to the accuracy of representation and is therefore a political move. The global North – due to the Enlightenment foundation of its knowledge base – tends to imagine the world as something comprised of discrete bounded entities. This chapter challenges an epistemology of separation to demonstrate the world is one of blending and networks (Capra and Luisi 2014).

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	New Materialities, Edibility, Edibility Approach, Hallucinogens, Eating, Body, Bodies, Ethnography, Anthropology, South American, Multispecies, Morethanhuman
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Divisions:	Institutes and Academies > Institute of Education and Humanities > Academic Discipline: Humanities and Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Luci Attala
Date Deposited:	21 Sep 2022 10:18
Last Modified:	05 Apr 2023 15:50
URI:	https://repository.uwtsd.ac.uk/id/eprint/2100

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