PANEL 5: Plants and Cure

With Monica Gagliano, Silvanete Lermen and João Paulo Lima Barreto

A talk with Mônica Nogueira, anthropologist and Professor at the University of Brasília

In 2017, João Paulo Lima Barreto, a Tukano indigenous and Doctor in Social Anthropology, founded the Bahserikowi’i, Center for Indigenous Medicine, in Manaus. He absolutely insisted on using “medicine” in the new institution’s name. It is a political-epistemological attitude: it places previously opposed “Traditional” and “Western” knowledge on an equal basis. For centuries, indigenous peoples and scientists have gathered information on the plants’ healing powers. João Paulo knows that it is urgent to create means of dialogue between the different healing technologies, with no predation or inferiority of indigenous knowledge. That’s why he proposes this conversation with Monica Gagliano, the Australian ecologist who studies plant cognition and wrote about the idea-exchanging dream she had with an Amazon tree on her book Thus Spoke the Plant; and with Silvanete Lermen, a farmer, healer, root knower, popular educator, community health advisor and researcher who has deep knowledge about plants in Northeastern Brazil semiarid region.