Right Relation with Tobacco: Decommercialization and Reverence
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The much-maligned tobacco plant has been exploited to kill more people than any other plant, with yearly tobacco deaths exceeding eight million globally. Yet, for indigenous peoples with many millennia of relationship with tobacco, the herb is regarded as a sacrament, a reminder of humility, a source of connection with communities beyond oneself. Juxtaposing traditional versus colonial tobacco use, I locate biocultural mechanisms which have led to such divergent human and ecological impacts of collaborating with versus instrumentalizing this plant. Sharing my personal history with tobacco as both a tobacco control researcher and a student of indigenous tobacco ways, I explore how tobacco can be understood as a metonymic plant for critical plant studies and human relations with the wider plant world through invoking the hermeneutic aspect of the medical and alchemical pharmakon.
Source: Zygon®
DOI: 10.16995/zygon.17672
Author: Yogi Hendlin
Institution: Erasmus University Rotterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,630
OpenAlex ID: W4414784373