All tagged plants

Materials in Motion in South African Healing Spaces

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in South Africa since 2021, this essay highlights the circulations of materials such as plants, stones, shells, powders, divining tools, and ritual substances between healing spaces generally considered as separate. These include spaces where specialists identify as holistic practitioners or spiritual seekers (reiki masters, energy or light workers, Tarot readers, psychic mediums, etc.) and those where officiants present themselves as indigenous diviners and healers, or sangomas: a Zulu term widely used. The circulation of material elements, as well as, to a lesser extent, of spirits and ritual subjects – whether human or more-than-human – between such spaces suggest their intrinsic, profound, and undoubtedly long-standing intertwining. It shows that the practices performed in them are intrinsically hybrid, creative and complex, which raises the question of the relevance of categories applied to them, such as African Traditional Religions, indigenous healing traditions, esotericism, or even alternative spiritualities, categories that emphasize the separateness rather than interconnectedness of the phenomena that they label.

Interview with Sedekah Benih – Urban Ecology and Community-based Art Activism

Sedekah Benih is a collaborative and urban environmental practice initiated by an urban farming activist, Dian Nurdiana (Mang Dian), and artist Vincent Rumahloine in 2020 in one of the dense urban neighborhoods in Cibogo, Bandung, West Java. It aims to share and exchange knowledge of urban farming more widely and build a community of “tiis leungen” (Sundanese for “cold arms”), a term comparable to the English “green thumbs”. Drawn from a localized Arabic word and concept of صدقة (sadaqah), which means “righteousness” and refers to the giving of charity, Sedekah Benih aims to share seeds of everyday staple plants that can be grown in dense community spaces and used for local and domestic needs. It encourage collaborators to share the seeds of plants they received with others from their communities, growing connected communities.