Next Monday I’ll be giving an online lecture for the Grupo de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Medicina (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), as part of the Seminario Permanente GESCTM 2026-1.
The talk is part of my ongoing effort to push multispecies/STS ethnography beyond “the encounter” and toward what circulates after the organism—when “the species” stops showing up as a whole and starts showing up as leaf, root, bark, powder, mixture, residue. In the nocturnal medicinal-plant market of Plaza Samper Mendoza (Bogotá), fragmentation isn’t an exception: it’s the condition that makes the market operable—because fragments can be recombined, prescribed, packaged, and advised into being.
Download the ppt.
Introduction
“Afterlives vegetales” foregrounds the key move of the talk: to follow vegetal matter after it stops presenting itself as “a plant” and begins to appear as piece, trace, dose, bundle, powder, scrap, infusion-ready chip. In Samper Mendoza, vegetality is constantly being detached, dried, ground, mixed, labeled, and reattached to new purposes—care, prevention, relief, belief, routine. What circulates is not a stable botanical entity, but a set of partial forms that gain force through handling: their smell, bitterness, texture, color, heat, friction, opacity. The market is an engine of transformation where plants become evidence and promise at the same time—proof of efficacy (“mire, huélalo, se siente”) and a speculative wager on what a fragment can do in the body.
This is why “afterlives” is not just a poetic word here. It is an analytic commitment: to track how fragments survive and proliferate through small infrastructures of circulation—plastic bags, handwritten labels, improvised classifications, vendor explanations, client memories, recipes, contraindications, warnings, and rituals of preparation. Once the object is fragmentary, knowledge cannot rely on taxonomy alone. It has to work through care (how to store, dose, combine, avoid), through verification practices (smelling, touching, tasting, comparing), and through situated classification (names that shift by vendor, use, region, texture, or effect). The question becomes less “what plant is this?” and more “what kind of fragment is this, what relations does it activate, and under what conditions does it hold together as something knowable?”
“Fragmentografía” (fragmentography) is the methodological device I’m developing to stay with that condition. It’s a way of writing and doing ethnography with fragments rather than against them: not rushing to restore wholes, not treating partiality as loss, but attending to how fragments organize perception, exchange, expertise, and care. Fragmentography asks for a descriptive discipline that remains close to material resonances (what the fragment is like), practical effects (what it does in situated use), and classificatory labor (how it is named, grouped, stabilized, and made to circulate). It’s a practice of following the fragment across hands, surfaces, bags, voices, and bodily expectations—tracking the small gestures through which vegetal afterlives become actionable, credible, and shareable.
🗓️ Online lecture (Google Meet)
- Monday, 23 February
- 05:00 PM (GTM -5)
- Link: https://meet.google.com/jeq-jjow-uit
If you’re around, join us—especially if you’re interested in STS, markets, vernacular taxonomies, multispecies methods, or the everyday politics of evidence when “the organism” is no longer the unit of analysis. The lecture will be held in Spanish.