I’m pleased to share that my paper Fragmented Floras: Ontologies of Medicinal Plant Fragments in Bogotá’s Markets is currently under review. The text grows from my larger research project, Fragmented Ecologies, which investigates how fragments—of plants, substances, and stories—circulate as forms of knowledge, care, and classification in Bogotá’s urban markets.
Drawing on fieldwork at Plaza Samper Mendoza—known as the “Palace of Herbs”—the paper examines how dried leaves, bundled roots, and powdered barks act as more-than-human agents within urban practices of healing and belief. Rather than treating these vegetal fragments as residues or losses, the essay follows their movements and transformations to reveal how they sustain everyday systems of care and cosmology.
Methodologically, the paper introduces fragmentography—an experimental ethnographic and curatorial practice that attends to what is partial, mobile, and affective. Through ethnographic vignettes, photographic documentation, and speculative taxonomies, Fragmented Floras explores how vernacular and more-than-human epistemologies unsettle Western modes of classification, particularly those rooted in colonial science and botanical order.
At a broader level, the work reflects on what happens when ethnography itself becomes fragmentary—when observation, description, and analysis are conducted through pieces, residues, and sensory traces. It argues that fragmentation can be both a methodological strategy and an ethical stance: a way of engaging with damaged worlds without seeking to restore or complete them. By curating fragments rather than closing them into systems, Fragmented Floras invites readers to imagine alternative grammars of relation, care, and attention.
This work contributes to broader conversations in anthropology and environmental humanities about how to think, write, and care with fragments in times of ecological and epistemic uncertainty.