Departmental News

Posted:  Apr 13, 2026 - 12:00pm

Christina Lorenzatto, doctoral candidate in the Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology (SCALA) subfield, has been awarded a Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant  to support her project What Kind of People are Piri-Piri?: Life Histories, Sensory Ecologies and Moral Agency of Huaste (Cyperus spp.) varieties cultivated by Shipibo-Konibo Women ofPeru.

Abstract

Despite decades of ethnobotanical and anthropological research in the Amazon, Indigenous forms of investigating, classifying, and relating to plants are still understood through colonizing frameworks that either appropriate knowledge while erasing Indigenous scientific practice, or treat Indigenous ontologies as incommensurable and largely ahistorical realities. This research examines how Shipibo-Konibo women's cultivation and use of Piri-Piri (Cyperus spp.)—medicinal sedges central to Amazonian life cycles—constitute an Indigenous scientific practice that integrates botanical, chemosensory, communicative, and moral dimensions of human-plant relationships. While Western taxonomy recognizes only 3-4 Cyperus species, Shipibo women distinguish over 50 varieties through multidimensional classification systems involving morphology, ecology, pharmacological properties, and plant personhood. Through ethnographic research across three settlement types (remote forest, peri-urban, urban) and three generations of women in the Ucayali region of Peru, I will investigate how women forge communicative relationships with Piri-Piri as conscious beings possessing agency and moral capacity. Through participant observation of cultivation practices, life history interviews, botanical inventories, chemosensory classification, and social network analysis, I will examine how knowledge transmission is being transformed by deforestation and urbanization. This research advances multispecies anthropology, revealing how Indigenous botanical practices enrich Western taxonomy while expanding understandings of plant communication, personhood and intelligence.