Microcosms Sacred Plants of the Americas

About this book

To pay homage to sacred plants revered by Indigenous groups throughout the Americas is a way of honouring the entire world in a time of environmental emergency. The visual contents of this book magnify life in ways that may alter how humans perceive other living entities from our shared and threatened biosphere.

Some of these plants contain the most potent psychoactive agents on the planet and serve as intermediaries that have enabled Native communities to communicate with their ancestors, wage war on the enemies of their land and their traditions, conceptualise entire cosmogonies, and maintain a nearly impossible ecological equilibrium.

Each exquisite detail in these vital portraits is not only a way into previously unseen vegetal realms, but also a potential way out of our collective crisis.

Contents

The essay by Steven F. White "Microcosmic Phytoformalism: Plant-Art, Visionary Experience and Eco-Activism" which provides a critical lens for this art-science project as well as a fuller appreciation and contextualization of the confocal images. A list of all plants included in the book with their scientific and common names that reflect the linguistic diversity of many different Indigenous cultures of the American continent. An extensive bibliography for further reading.

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jill Pflugheber is a Microscopy Specialist who taught Scanning Electron Microscopy, Transmission Electron Microscopy, Research Methods in Fluorescence and Confocal Microscopy, and Research Methods in Cell Biology at her alma mater St. Lawrence University, for almost twenty years. She has also worked in biomedical research at Harvard University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Texas SW Medical Center. In the summer of 2023, she relocated to Kentucky and resumed her research career in a lab at the University of Kentucky that studies immune responses to RNA virus infection and vaccination.

Steven F. White is an independent historian residing in Frederick, Maryland, USA. The recipient of two Fulbright awards and a research fellowship at the European University Institute, he has taught at the University of Virginia, Averett University, the University of Perugia, Mount St. Mary's University and the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute. Educated at Williams College and the University of Oregon, White is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency and two Fulbright grants for a literary project in Chile and curricular development as a Senior Specialist in Nicaragua. When he was 22, his interest in sacred plants motivated him to visit a Cofan community in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1977. During a transformative sabbatical year in 1993-94, he actively participated in the Santo Daime Church on the island of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. His research with Microscopy Specialist Jill Pflugheber, Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas, was presented as an exhibit at the Brush Art Gallery in 2020 at St. Lawrence University, where White was a founder of the Caribbean and Latin American Studies program.