5 - Harvests of Change

Summary

Chapter 5 frames the book’s narrative in the style of a lengthy coda. It is concerned with how the bark’s prevalence, wide fame and general ‘usefulness’ in therapeutic practice among geographically disperse and socially diverse societies affected its natural habitat in the central and northern Andes. The bark’s very ‘mobility’ and the popular demand that arose for it, the chapter argues, altered the harvest areas’ landscape of possession, commerce and demographics, the distribution and abundance of vegetation, and the livelihood, health and fate of the men and women implicated in harvesting, processing and conveying the bark. The chapter reminds readers, at parting, how plant trade, therapeutic exchange and epistemic brokerage are not extricable from time and space. Consumption and the imaginaries, therapeutic practice and medical understandings attendant to it invariably begins with changes to the material world, to physical nature and society.