Guest Blog: Sophia Rey ’27
Finding the right subject for a paper is always the first and most crucial step to research and writing. Often, it’ll be a person, place, or even a significant event. However, at the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative, plants are always front and center.
As a History concentrator, I became drawn to the Initiative’s work after writing a paper about ayahuasca and Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes last year in a tutorial on imperial history. I wrote about the limits of Western scientific knowledge production when faced with the plethora of cultural meaning and cosmological significance that the sacred psychedelic plant held for Indigenous communities across the Amazon, where Schultes conducted his research. Unknown to me at the time, my thinking was in line with the mission of the Plant Humanities, a field coined and led by the research and Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks. Framed as an interdisciplinary approach, the Plant Humanities aspire to employ and blend various methodologies and scholarly perspectives to understand the entanglement between plants and human cultures.
My work at the Plant Humanities Initiative began in early January when I arrived at the Dumbarton Oaks campus in Georgetown, a historic neighborhood in Washington, D.C. As a winter-session intern, I was tasked with researching and writing a public-facing article for the Plant of the Month series, a publication of JSTOR Daily. As a daughter of the Venezuelan diaspora, my heart and mind were especially occupied with the U.S. military action in the country at the beginning of the year, causing me to reflect on a special cultural tradition of hallaca-making, a Christmastime cornmeal-based dish that is wrapped and cooked in banana leaves. Initial inquiry into the history of this practice revealed that scholars, botanists, and archaeologists have been debating the origin of the banana plant in the Americas for hundreds of years. I was fascinated by this—how could a plant whose leaf was so integral to sustained cultural practice somehow be ‘foreign’? Moreover, given the Indigenous roots of the culinary tradition, what could be said about the heritage of a national dish whose essential components have disparate origins?
These questions were ripe for the breadth of resources and research going on at Dumbarton Oaks. After receiving a tour of the combined campus, gardens, museum, and libraries, I dove into colonial-era missionary manuscripts, intricate botanical illustrations, and hundreds of banana-related articles. Due to the short-term nature of the internship, the first week was devoted to reading a broad breadth of sources to gain an overview of what has been written about the banana plant throughout history. After narrowing in on my region of interest and identifying the key authors I wanted to highlight, I discussed the outline and argument of my article with Émile Levesque-Jalbert, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Plant Humanities Initiative, along with Kari Traylor, a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow who manages the Plant of the Month publication. My final week was devoted to writing and refining my article based on these conversations and many others I had with the numerous, brilliant scholars at Dumbarton Oaks.
One such instance was when I had the privilege of attending a research talk by Daiana Rivas-Tello, a Junior Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies, whose work attends to how Huanca pottery-makers adapt to new ecologies following imperial displacement in the Peruvian Amazon. Although Daiana’s research and subjects were quite different from my own, listening to her speak about cultural resilience, adaptation, and dynamic conceptions of Indigeneity inspired me to think deeply about the kind of story I could tell about the banana plant and traditional Venezuelan hallacas. Similarly, I had the pleasure of meeting Dean Michel, a Fellow of the Mellon Democracy and Landscape Initiative, whose research focuses on dam-building along the Colorado River and its impact on the Chemehuevi people. Conversations with Dean touched on themes of sovereignty, colonialism, and relationships to the natural world, which also greatly contributed to my intellectual engagement and curiosity. I am also deeply grateful for another welcoming Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies, Hannah K. Scruggs, who researches African American water-based knowledge, relationships, and worlds. Through lunch-time conversations with Hannah, I learned that the land now called Dumbarton Oaks is the unceded homeland of the Piscataway peoples and that enslaved people once labored and lived on the property.
My time at Dumbarton Oaks was marked by a refreshing epistemological shift towards what scholar Michael Pollan calls a “plant’s-eye view”. The Plants Humanities framework requires us to think of plants as central subjects of inquiry and beings in possession of agency—not merely objects of human manipulation. While the winter-session internship was brief, I returned to Cambridge feeling inspired by the diverse array of incredible scholarship and scholars working hard at this institution to tell untold histories, make new connections, and foreground nature within their studies.
