Communicating beyond the Human

Abstract

Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente (2015) pushes at the limits of the human in several ways. It addresses the genocidal consequences of extractive capitalism, the transcendent promise of both shamanism and religious fanaticism, and communication between humans, animals, and plants, especially via the use of hallucinogenic plants such as ayahuasca. Set in a similar upper Amazon context to Eduardo Kohn’s acclaimed work of posthuman theory How Forests Think, the film dramatizes aspects of his theorization of nonhuman semiosis. In its plot and visual language, El abrazo draws heavily on the writing and photography of Richard Evans Schultes, the ethnobotanist whose work overlapped with that of counter cultural icon Timothy Leary. In this chapter I suggest that Guerra’s dramatization of interspecies communication also speaks to a less academically respected but nonetheless less posthuman line of thought: the counter cultural movement that advocates consumption of hallucinogenic Amazonian plants. In reading El abrazo as the meeting point of the posthuman thinking of Kohn and the neo-ayahasqueros I ask what the similarities are between the two.