I completed my BA and MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich. In 2021 and 2023, I had the privilege of living with a Kichwa-speaking family in Napo, Ecuador. During this time, I grappled with the complexities of local agroforestry chagra systems, as well as hunting and healing practices. The focus of my master’s research on trapping systems (tikta, tuklla, and pangua) emerged from several months of participatory observation in the region. Traps appeared as part of multispecies relations, weaving humans, other animals, plants and spirit dueños into a common patchwork.
Growing up as a queer person, socialized in post-colonial Cyprus and the EU, has shaped my current research interests in theories of the body, gender, health and (de)coloniality. My contribution to “Planetary Healing as a Transformative Process” consists in closely collaborating with Kichwa-speaking healers in the Ecuadorian Oriente. In contrast to One-World approaches to health, such as ‘One Health’ and ‘Global Health’, this exchange seeks to uncover fragmented, decolonizing ways of knowing, interacting, and healing with the planet. This involves shedding light on how communities in Abya Yala perceive, scale, and attribute (healing) agency to their land and to more-than-human entities.
Project: The entanglements of Kichwa Healing Practices with Other-Than-Human Environments