Knowledge Share Description

Cannabis is more frequently in the news than any other plant, and, by some measures, it is the most valuable crop in the U.S. It is the world’s most widespread drug plant. Yet most people know little about the plant’s past beyond pop-cultural rumors, most of which are false and serve either to support or to oppose cannabis legality. This knowledge share moves beyond rumors to outline the plant’s documented history, which underscores the importance of African knowledge in the currently dominant uses of the plant worldwide.

Pan-African experiences are complexly entwined in the plant’s past. If you know that cannabis can be a smoked drug, that is ancient African knowledge; water pipes were anciently invented in Africa; enslaved people from Central Africa carried the plant across the Atlantic, and their words for the plant survive in English; hemp industries in many countries depended upon enslaved people; commercial marijuana industries depend upon seeds taken from Africa. Historical experiences such as these have been forgotten in modern societies, despite robust evidence of the foundational importance of African knowledge in shaping global interactions with the plant.

Cannabis can provide fiber, oil seeds and psychoactive substances. It is neither good nor bad; it has been sometimes a plant of power, and sometimes a plant of the powerless. This knowledge share shows how knowledge of the plant’s past is needed for understanding cannabis as it changes from a black-market commodity to a mainstream product. Participants will gain abilities to think critically about how cannabis exists around us in current societies, and to outline the plant’s known past in contrast to widely circulated but inaccurate historical anecdotes. Participants will gain mindfulness about the human heritage embedded in the plant’s physical and pharmacological characteristics.

We will explore:

• The African roots of cannabis

• Cannabis’s journey to the Atlantic world

• How cannabis exists around us in current societies, and reject baseless stories about the plant's past that have served to promote political ends rather than improve knowledge about cannabis

• Mindfulness about the human heritage embedded in the plant's physical and pharmacological characteristics

• List important objective effects of psychoactive cannabis, and explain causes of subjective effects

• Describe the evolutionary origins, general ecology, and global dispersal of cannabis

• Summarize and explain portrayals of Africa and Africans in popular knowledge of cannabis

• Provide evidence for African origins of current uses of psychoactive cannabis

• Explain reasons why hemp cannabis did not succeed in most European colonies

• Summarize how exploitative labor relationships led to the expansion of psychoactive cannabis use

• Describe how hemp cannabis and psychoactive cannabis crossed the Atlantic and colonized the

  Americas

• List and describe major cultures of cannabis use that have existed in Pan-African settings

• Explain historical causes of cannabis criminalization, and summarize its impacts on marginalized communities

Cost

$35 - low income

$50 - standard

$75 - pay-it-forward (if you have financial abundance, this is our pay-it-forward option to fund our full tuition scholarships)

For more information on sliding scale please check out this amazing work!

The zoom link will be sent upon registration. Recording will be available for 30 days.

Please apply here for a scholarship.

Accessibility Information

Virtual Gathering

*ASR (automated) captioning provided

The knowledge share zoom link will be sent out immediately upon purchase, along with any other necessary information.

Wednesday May 15, 2024

5:00pm - 7:00pm Eastern Standard Time

Class will be recorded and available for 30 days. This means you can join from anywhere in the world.

Facilitator

Dr. Chris Duvall received an appointment with the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at The University of New Mexico in 2008. As a biogeographer, Duvall’s research relates to how humans represent and depict their environment, as well as human-plant interaction. His academic interests include cultural and historical ecology, African diaspora, food geography, and science studies. Duvall is interested in how the social constructions of human difference affect access to and use of environmental resources, human-environment interactions involved in illicit drug commerce, and the environmental meanings of food, among other topics. His research has primarily focused on plant-people relationships in western Africa and the Atlantic world, including well-known plants (such as the baobab tree) and obscure, rare plants. and other plants that people in western Central Africa used medicinally. He has published two books, Cannabis (Reaktion Books, 2015), The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), and many papers in academic journals.