Charis Ford Morrison Boke

Works In Progress

• My ethnographic work with North American herbalist clinicians, educators, and medicine-makers grounds my manuscript in progress, Materials of the Medicine: An Ethnography of Plant-Human Relations in Western Herbalism. In it, I follow key plant-human relations across the planet and through archives and gardens, tracing human stories, uses, trade routes, and concoctions involving the traditionally medicinal herbs ashwagandha (Withania somnifera), boneset (Eupatoria perfoliatum), rose (rosa spp.), and sweet annie (Artemisia annua). These plants, rooted as they are in various places as part of the materials of medicine, guide the story I tell about the lively plant-human connections still unfolding in North American herbalism among practitioners. My interlocutors call themselves "Western herbalists" in contradistinction from practitioners of Ayurvedic or Chinese medicine, African or European herbalism. However, the "Western" in Western herbalism here, too, points to attempts at assimilation of multiple kinds of knowledge about medicinal plants.

  I examine this process of assimilation, attending to how particular medicinal plants have come to play key roles in North American Western herbalism. Contemporary herbalists in the United States practice in the context of (and sometimes in resistance to) the settler-colonial nation-state, formal regulatory bodies, and modes of knowledge production informed by biomedicine. I frame their engagement in this context as one of awkward healing, wherein practitioners attempt partial redress for past and present violences and move with uncertainty but commitment to "figuring it out." I focus on herbalist practices of growing, gathering, and preparing plant medicines everywhere from kitchens and classrooms to forests, clinics and warehouses. I attend to the ways herbalists' practices of medicine- making extend to clinical and teaching encounters as they connect medicinal plants with people who may benefit from them. I also draw on historical documents such as herbals, lecture notes, practitioners' materia medica (documentation of medicinal plants and their uses) of the 17-20th centuries, and other letters, diaries, and biographies that document the movement of plants across the planet in and after the Columbian exchange. I suggest that medicinal plants have been, and continue to be, active participants in shaping cultures and histories of medicine.

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