Biography
Amy Leia McLachlan is a medical and environmental anthropologist, and researcher at the Field Museum. Her current book project is The World for Now: Curing and Cosmopoesis in a Migrant Amazon, considers the ethics of world-making under conditions of perpetual impossibility.
Research
Amy Leia McLachlan is a medical and environmental anthropologist, and researcher at the Field Museum. Her current book project is The World for Now: Curing and Cosmopoesis in a Migrant Amazon, considers the ethics of world-making under conditions of perpetual impossibility.
Amy Leia McLachlan is a medical and environmental anthropologist whose work considers the ethics, politics, and transformative potential of relations to and through plant life. Her research since 2006 with Uitoto communities of the Colombian Amazon traces the history of extractive botanical economies as vectors of radically conflicting dreams about livable worlds. Her current book project, The World for Now: Curing and Cosmopoesis in a Migrant Amazon, draws on apprenticeship with Uitoto migrant curers, rainforest cultivators, and urban conjurers to consider what it means to continue projects of world-making as the conditions of that making are continuously undone. A second book project, Migrant Medicine: Between the Seven Worlds with Uitoto Plantworkers, explores the relationship between Uitoto narratives of displacement as illness, and curing songs that locate the origins of healing in spirit migration between worlds, through images, song, and migrants’ curing stories. An ongoing ethnographic and archival research project, on the ethics of surrogation, pursues questions of intersubjectivity and transformation across spaces of ecological, therapeutic, and political repair.
Affiliation: Researcher, Field Museum (Chicago)
