Charis Ford Morrison Boke
Research Scientist, Department of Anthropology
Lecturer, Department of Anthropology
Lecturer, Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages
I'm currently working on a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation's Senior Cultural Anthropology Award and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR, Award #2446303). You can find the abstract for this grant at NSF's Award Search site by searching "Cooperation, Communication, and Networks in the Context of Inland Riverine Flooding," or you can click here for a direct link. I am excited to continue work on this important project about response, recovery, and mitigation in rural inland riverine flooding disaster contexts. Check out our Rural Rivers/Mapping for Resilience team website.
Contact
Department(s)
Anthropology
Education
- Ph.D., Cornell University 2018
- M.A., University of Chicago 2009
- B.A., Mills College 2006
Selected Publications
2026. Boke, C. Enchanting with paperwork: epistemic pluralism and Western herbalists in the United States. Anthropology & Medicine, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13648470.2025.2604006
2025 Boke, C.; Kelly, S.; Spang, A.. "Assessing the 2023 Floods in Rural Vermont: Multimodal Methodology and Community Science for Mitigation in the Black River Valley." Natural Hazards Center Weather Ready Research Reports.
2025 Boke, C. "Boneset/break" in Anthropology and Humanism. Vol 50:1, June 2025.
2025 Bezanson, N.; Reddy, E.; Boke, C.; Kelly, S.; Santi, P. "Developing a New Interdisciplinary Model for Mapping Flood Risks and Impacts." Natural Hazards Center Mitigation Matters Research Reports.
Speaking Engagements
2026 Invited Speaker, "Scholar-Practice: Living Knowledge in the Plural." Applied Anthropology Network of the European Association for Social Anthropologists (https://applied-anthropology.com/)
2025 Chair and Panelist, "Climate Resilience in Africa: Community Innovation and Environmental Impact."
Panelist, "Human-Centered Innovation: Turning Insight into Impact," at the Provost's Dartmouth in Africa Summit. Nairobi, Kenya.at the Provost's Dartmouth in Africa Summit. Nairobi, Kenya.2026 Invited Speaker, "Culvert Crawlers Community Science Survey and Map," for Flood Ready VT, State of Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, Flood Resilience Drop-In Session.
2025 Panelist, "Feeding Resistance: Power, Justice, and Food Sovereignty," John Sloane Dickey Center for International Understanding, Dartmouth College.
2024 Okemo Valley Local Access Television: "Black River Action Team and the Culvert Crawlers," Public Service informational interview on research https://okemovalley.tv/cavendish-culvert-crawlers
2024 "Health and Sustainability Panel," Climate Month event, Dartmouth Sustainability Office, Dartmouth College
2024 Panelist, Research Symposium on Energy and Society: The Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society, Dartmouth College
Works In Progress
My long-term ethnographic work with self-identified "Western herbalists" in the United States grounds this book. In it, people grow, gather, prepare, and discuss plant medicines, their uses, their political implications, and their histories in forests, fields, classrooms, and warehouses. I frame these conversations about what counts as "good medicine" in the context of colonization, experimentation, and formalization of medicine. I show how people aligned with a dizzying array of political projects use plants, including, for instance, in anti-science narratives ascendant in current American national dialogue.
I start with the plants, engaging the senses to link readers and the material world. For instance, writing about boneset (Eupatoria perfoliatum), I unpack the herbalist notion that bitter flavors are key to boneset's medicinal actions. I then broaden bitter medicine into a metaphor, reflecting on boneset's role in American colonization. Lateral moves like this help open a conversation about how different political movements use plants to make strategic cultural claims. How we know good medicine manifests in health policies, relations with the environment, and ideas about doctors and scientists. Readers will come away with a sense of the internal diversity and historical complexity of American herbalism, as well as its political freight.