Month: April 2024

Healing Justice

Posted on by Charis

In December 2023 I made my first sustained research journey to re-establish connection with long-time colleagues and interlocutors working in Boriken on healing justice and rematriation. For now, pending conversations with interlocutors that will determine what happens with this research, I will call this organization Lo Semillere.

Lo Semillere’s core mission focuses on healing justice and rematriation of knowledge and people, in the context of ongoing injustice created by U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico. I traveled as a Solidarity Guest to Lo Semillere’s workshop space, a community of practice, for a 2-week visit. While there, I lived alongside founders and key coordinadores of Lo Semillere, and offered support as requested. One key request from staff and members was that I offer a workshop series on community care and basic first aid (akin to trainings I offer in Vermont and the northeast frequently). I offered this as part of a solidarity exchange model to support my presence as a researcher there.

As a collective, we also determined that it would be useful to the 7 core members of Lo Semillere for me to facilitate a series of smaller conversations around how the members envision, understand, practice, and teach their core mission. We aimed to open a space for LS members to reflect on their own practices around rematriation–of plants, medicinal knowledge, and people in diaspora–to examine what kinds of broader implications that work has. I approached this from my usual dual role of scholar-activist who has been following their work – scholarly and activist – via one of their founders for years. 

Lo Semillere is an ideal site to incubate questions about practices for and of rematriation and healing justice. The organization situates itself deliberately athwart ongoing crises of U.S. settler occupation, militarization of the island, debt calamities, high energy costs, and disaster & hurricane recovery (Rosario 2013; McGranahan and Collins 2018; Rosario and Arroyo 2022; Harrison et al. 2016). Lo Semillere’s community consists of people with different relationships to Boriken diaspora–some with Taino ancestry whose families never left the island, some who left and came back, or who returned decades after their parents or grandparents moved to the US mainland, and yet others who are only able to be in remote relation to the island. 

In the Boriken context, Lo Semillere’s work brings together these diverse kinds of diasporic relations to place and knowledge in a particular kind of post-disaster space. They bring radical attention to the ways diverse capabilities and needs manifest. Their practices can instruct herbalists and scholars alike on what is possible in terms of justice, ethics, and healing, in the context of global climate crisis in its many manifestations—including the dynamics of empire.

We haven’t yet assembled formal publications on these research engagements. When we do, you can look for them here!

The book

Posted on by Charis

Poison, Power, and Possibility: Building Relations with Medicinal Plants attends to sensory practices of relationship with plants and ecologies. With an ethnographic focus on White “western herbalists” in the United States, I attend to their practices 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 (Boke 2020; Stoler 2013; McGranahan and Collins 2018; Byrd 2011; Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen 2005; Boke 2018; Boke 2015). I describe links and interdictions among herbalists, biomedical communities, and Native, First Nations, Black, and global Indigenous communities from whom a significant portion of western herbalist knowledge comes. Working with the premise that white supremacy culture and ‘settler common sense’ (Okun 1999; Rifkin 2014) shape most aspects of White herbalists’ practices—whether acknowledged or no—I offer a caring critique of practices intended for healing.

The development of contemporary scientific ecology as language and practice foregrounded abstracted, quantitative knowledge about places, rather than storied, emergent, contingent, and contextual relationship with them. Therefore, demands to repair relationships across communities fail. Calls for “accountability” in corporate bioprospecting or medical relations with plants for health lack the specificity, in most cases, that medical anthropological attention can call to ethnobotanical processes (see e.g. Hsu and Harris n.d.; Cruikshank 2005; Kohn 2013). Detangling the threads that have been woven by power, statecraft, regulatory mechanism, the invisibilizing process of “science” as a mode of knowledge production is a complex task. to build with Marilyn Strathern’s notion of partiality (Strathern 2004), and Donna Haraway’s notion of the situatedness of knowledge (Haraway 1988), “facts” about plants and bodies are always only partially available for knowability in other contexts, regardless of how many forms of power are exerted upon them (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012; 2015; 2017). Their partial knowability is contingent on histories of colonial exploration, the dominance of a particular system of scientific knowledge production, and more. To be clear, those systems are not totalizing in shaping how information is mobilized and used, just as the ongoing context of settler-colonialism fully conditions all aspects of life “inside” (Chakrabarty 2001; Sachs 2003; Spivak 1988; A. Simpson 2007; L. B. Simpson 2014; Smith 2012). For instance, even what is now known as “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (TCM) has become a set of codified, if internally diverse, practices partially in response to the rise of world markets commodifying Eastern medical practices, and a Chinese state promoting a version of health with “specifically Chinese characteristics” (Kuriyama 2011; Hare 1993; Scheid 2002; Judith Farquhar and Zhang 2012; J. Farquhar 2002). These practices, as we know them today, are already conditioned by long histories of European colonial and settler-colonial knowledge practices, violences, extractions, and codifications.

Plant studies and plant humanities as fields of study continue to expand, branching out from ethnobotany in what seems in some moments like a return to the sweeping “natural history” studies of the 18th and 19th centuries. I describe and engage with the poetics, politics, and practices of western herbalism through ethnographic research, botanical histories, and biographies. The book project contributes to a vibrant, growing academic conversation in plant humanities which straddles disciplinary boundaries to reconsider human-plant relations now and over time. As a humanist, I am interested in all kinds of agency—including that of plants and places—and how they manifest. Londa Schiebinger, Sharla Fett, Victoria Johnson, Yota Batsaki, and others have written cogently about the ways that humans have historically taken up plants as part of projects of individual, communal, and imperial power (Schiebinger 2007; Fett 2002; 2002; Johnson 2019; Batsaki, Cahalan, and Tchikine 2016).

In Poison, Power, and Possibility, I make two primary interventions:

  1. I propose unsettling as a mode of acting and practice in a time of ecological and social disruption that starts, as herbalists suggest we must, with bodily sensation and engagement; and
  2. I structure the book as a materia medica to work through and with the forms of knowledge production that delimit and enable western herbalist knowledges.

I argue that herbalists’ understandings of history, knowledge, movement, medicinal capacity, and ecological role of medicinal plants can teach us how human connections with plants extend beyond mere usage, into the realm of what Viveiros de Castro might call the experiential “metaphysics of the other” (Viveiros de Castro 2014). I suggest this is true even in cultural settings where and when such experiential metaphysics may be papered over by a veneer of scientific rationality. In my framing, herbalists and their bodily practices with plants are attuned to the high-stakes anxieties of life and concern for livable futures on a warming planet. North American herbalists agree that healing is not coterminous with acts or with substances alone, but rather with the relations and connections enabled and marked by them.

In the last 30 years, western herbalism in the United States has moved to fill gaps in wellbeing—through market and social mechanisms. This move has been significantly less well attended to, although there are reams of historical and contemporary examinations of “exotic” and Indigenous medicines and biomedicine. This is one area where my book project directly matters. It matters also because social scientists and humanists interested in human and more-than-human thriving need more, and more specific, tools to grapple with how white supremacy culture closes off possibilities for wellbeing on Earth. My work speaks directly to such questions of plants, history, culture and power in plant humanities and environmentally oriented social sciences.

Structured as a “materia medica” such as used by herbalists today, and by medical practitioners of all sorts for centuries, this book examines what ails plant medicine practices, what ails humans on a damaged planet, and offers practices for potential remedies. I document how a plant has been known, has traveled, has worked on bodies and places. This work is underpinned by ethnographic fieldwork and by my extensive archival research. Each materia medica also grounds a particular lens on how knowledge has flowed through plants, and what that knowledge has signaled vis a vis power, domination, and wellness—again, ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials support the framing of these lenses.

Such a structure suggests a path towards undisciplining: a re-enlivening of anthropological and historical approaches to knowledge about plant human relations. I weave together medical and environmental humanist approaches to contextualizing substances, bodies, and ecologies. These approaches help me sustain my examination of the long-term relationships among plants, people, and places. Through engaging this format, with interspersed opportunities for embodied practice on the reader’s part, I attempt to unearth observations and encounters with plants that allow room for multiple kinds of cross-species agencies, telling stories of power and violence, but also beauty and, perhaps, healing.

Like all my work, this project is deeply grounded in community-responsive models for developing research projects. It grows out of my work with herbalists and organizers in the continental United States and resonates with themes that emerge in those communities: tensions around whose knowledge counts, matters, and can be used in herbalist practices; where and how knowledge and plants have been appropriated; where and how they might be returned, rematriated, repaired. I engage with scholars and activists trying to create more just and ethical models for engaged scholarship with communities at risk of, or experiencing, economic and social marginalization in the context of empire. I hold a commitment to developing and working in reflexive ethical approaches to research method; the second being a commitment to highlighting the work of everyday ethics among people figuring out how to live better on a planet troubled by empire and climate change.