Cultivating Futures: Botanical Economies and Knowledge Ecologies in Migrant Colombian Amazonia

This dissertation traces a colonial history of the Colombian Amazon through extractive botanical economies from rubber to cocaine to bioprospecting. It centers the botanical in alignment with the Indigenous Uitoto philosophy that it seeks to translate, as an archive of the Uitoto community's work to remake kinworlds and cosmological order in the wake and the midst of world-rending violence. I argue that Uitoto experimental efforts to reconstitute the substantial foundations of a mode of ethical affectivity beyond the human represent a Sisyphean cosmopoesis with and through the non-human in a context of apparent impossibility. Translating Uitoto praxis into a reflection on the meaning of relation in the midst of planetary ecological collapse, this dissertation asks: What does it mean to continue a project of cosmopoesis even as that world unspools at an accelerating pace? What possibilities for ethical relation remain, or are revealed, in a moment of unimaginable loss