Botany Brown Bag with Vikram Tamboli

Join us on Thursday, March 12 from 12-1 pm at La Kretz Garden Pavilion for another installment of Botany Brown Bag. Vikram Tamboli will give a talk titled "Seeds of Power: Poisoning, Ritual Dance and Afro-Indigenous Knowledge in the Americas."

"Seeds of Power" restrings the frayed history and geography of an obscure technology, ankle rattles and girdles made of toxic seeds of the Thevetia or yellow oleander plant. At least since the sixteenth century, people of Indigenous and African ancestry have used these seeds in a variety of ceremonial dances from Amazonia to Mesoamerica. Partial knowledge and material evidence of these seeds and rattles circulated through accounts of travelers and explorers, early modern herbals, and cabinets of curiosity and, by the nineteenth century, reached museum and herbarium collections across the globe. The story of these Thevetia seed rattles emerged through Dr. Tamboli's research on the Afro-Indigenous politics of assault in the Guianas for his book manuscript 'Black Powers and Bush Work: A history of trafficking ideas in Amazonia and the Caribbean, 1722-2022'. This talk gives an overview of the new project and offers some preliminary reflections on the rattles that are housed in U.S. collections and recent conversations with the Akawaio community members in Guyana.

Vikram Tamboli is currently a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and creator and co-director of the Healing and harming garden at UCLA.

Make sure to bring your lunch!

This event is free and open to the public, no RSVP required!

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Host or Publisher UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden