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

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.

The study used ethnographic fieldwork in the municipality of Borba, Amazonas. Semi-structured interviews and guided property tours were conducted at 91 households across 16 rural communities during a 12-month period between 2009 and 2010. Home gardens were defined to include a cleared area around the house and surrounding orchards, typically covering less than 0.5 ha. Because respondents were sometimes reluctant to discuss ‘‘magical’’ plants directly, the researchers employed proxy questions: whether plants were used to ‘‘scare off the evil eye’’ or for household protection, and whether they were used in healing baths (banhos) commonly relied upon to treat culturally specific folk illnesses. Open-ended interviews elicited additional species and uses. Kawa used local ethnospecies classifications and associated them with Latin binomials; voucher specimens were not collected because the author judged most taxa to be common and reliably identifiable in the field. The extracted text does not clearly report quantitative analysis methods or statistical tests beyond descriptive tallies.

In the 91 properties surveyed, respondents identified 171 useful plant species, of which 47 were considered to have magico-medicinal properties focused primarily on protection (for example, against the evil eye) and on healing folk illnesses. Pião roxo (Jatropha gossypiifolia) was the most commonly encountered magico-medicinal species in home gardens, followed by mucura-caá (Petiveria alliacea); arruda (Ruta spp.) and other taxa were also reported frequently. Religious differences emerged in attitudes and self-reported practices. Many Evangelical informants criticised Catholic practices such as saint veneration and associated magico-medicinal plant use with idolatry and moral laxity, yet not all Evangelical households avoided these plants: four of the 12 Evangelical households surveyed reported plants used in healing baths (including pião roxo, japana/Ayapana triplinervis, and mucura-caá). Amazonian folk Catholics commonly maintained a syncretic repertoire of plants used for ritual protection and healing, drawing on Amerindian pajelança and Afro-Brazilian traditions. Historical and ethnobotanical findings linked several common garden species to Afro-Brazilian and colonial histories: pião roxo is associated with the Candomblé deity Omolu and household protection rituals; mucura-caá has regional uses in ritual cleansing and, in Northeastern Brazil, historical associations as ‘‘amansa-senhor’’ with clandestine uses during slavery; and arruda was adopted as an abortifacient and protective plant by enslaved Africans. These historical associations help explain some Evangelical distancing from such plants because of their perceived links to marginalised racial and ethnic groups. Field observations highlighted that many magico-medicinal species are weedy colonisers that appear spontaneously in domestic spaces and are sometimes left to grow (a practice the author terms ‘‘sparing’’ or passive cultivation). Kawa documents several informant accounts (for example, residents Diana and Gisele) who described species such as pião roxo as having ‘‘appeared’’ in yards without deliberate planting. Other commonly adopted weedy species reported include Portulaca pilosa, Eryngium foetidum, Bryophyllum pinnatum, Acmella oleracea, Pluchea sagittalis, Chenopodium ambrosioides, Jatropha curcas, and others.

Kawa interprets the findings as reflecting the confluence of social history, religious change, and plant ecology. The author argues that Evangelical rejection of magico-medicinal plants can be understood in part as a strategy to dissociate from longer legacies of racial and economic marginalisation that are indexed in those plants and in Afro-Brazilian and indigenous religious practices. For some converts, Evangelical Christianity offers a ‘‘break with the past’’—a pathway to disavow personal or collective histories of abuse, substance use, or marginalisation—and rejecting plants associated with those histories aligns with that project. At the same time, the paper emphasises that plant biology matters: many magico-medicinal taxa are weedy species with life-histories that favour rapid colonisation of disturbed, human-occupied spaces. Kawa and the cited ethnobotanical literature suggest that such weeds often contain secondary bioactive compounds and are easily accessible medicines, which helps explain their widespread adoption. The author reframes this dynamic as a form of ‘‘weedy agency’’, proposing that plants’ tendencies to colonise human environments complicate purely human-centred accounts of cultural change because they can persist and re-enter domestic spaces despite human attempts to exclude them. Limitations acknowledged by the author include respondents' reluctance to talk directly about ‘‘magical’’ plants, the use of proxy survey questions to elicit information, and the decision not to collect voucher specimens. Kawa also notes ambiguities in earlier survey tabulations and calls for further research to clarify the causal pathways linking religious change, racialised stigma, and plant use. The discussion emphasises that these findings are observational and interpretive rather than experimental; the extracted text does not report inferential statistical analyses to test hypotheses about causation.

Kawa concludes that magico-medicinal plants should not be seen only as cultural fetishes projected upon by humans, because many of these species possess ecological characteristics that enable them to persist in human-dominated landscapes. The author suggests that Evangelical disavowal of these plants, rooted partly in the plants' historical associations with marginalised groups, is unlikely to erase the presence of the species themselves or the broader cultural practices that sustain them. Kawa further proposes that some Evangelicals may re-adopt these species for explicitly medicinal purposes while insisting on different explanatory frameworks, and that recent concessions by the Catholic Church to folkloric practices may also affect future trajectories. The paper closes by calling for further study of the intertwined social and ecological processes that shape the persistence and meanings of magico-medicinal plants in Amazonia.