Monthly Archives: April 2024

Healing Justice

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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

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 medicinemaking 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.

Until now, most scholarship on plants and empire has focused on the development of botany, ecology, horticulture, and agricultural practices as sciences, with medicinal plant practitioners in the Global North taking a back seat to the story of the development of “western” sciences. This project seeks answers to questions not yet fully addressed in the literature around how herbalists, as ever-more-popular complementary and alternative medicine practitioners, grapple with the ways medicinal plant knowledge has been acquired. The book is part of a long arc of research and writing that shapes my career goals, in which I seek to refine attention to the impacts of settler colonialism on human and environmental wellbeing, and to practices already being used to address those impacts.

Many medicinal plants whose roots are traced to specific locations and specific medical practices on the planet have traveled far and wide through the processes of imperial encounter, colonial theft, bioprospecting and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, respectful and generous sharing of knowledge. Many of these are taken up in Western herbalist educational settings and transmitted as knowledge through written, oral, and experiential methods. Rather than portraying practitioners actively or passively erasing the legacy of Indigenous and other forms of extracted knowledge, I tell a story of a community multiple, which holds many relations with plants.

Following herbalist knowledge transmission in classrooms, farm furrows, forests, meadows, and apothecary formulation rooms, I describe how herbalists think about and understand their responsibilities to plants, people, and history. Western herbalism offers an ideal ethnographic site for attention to cultural and historical relations with medicinal plants to address my central question: how does the form and practice of the materia medica enable and foreclose transmission of plant-human relations across time? And how does the epistemic tension at the heart of Western herbalism shape those relations? I argue that close attention to multispecies relations with medicinal plants and the movement of knowledge through the form of the materia medica opens a new avenue for historians and ethnographers of science and multispecies studies to examine the meaning and method of “wellbeing” on a troubled planet.

This is a humanistic social scientific and historiographic project, making unique contributions to multispecies studies, science studies, and environmental humanities. To medical and environmental humanist scholarship, I add a vitalist engagement with the materials and matters of contemporary herbal medicine; for multispecies studies, this project accomplishes a longue-dure accounting of the histories and politics of plant relations in medicine; and finally, to settler colonial studies, I contribute sustained attention to tensions between healing work and decolonial or unsettling praxis. I weave together medical and environmental humanist approaches to contextualizing substances, bodies, and ecologies to examine long-term relationships among medicinal plants, people, and places. This book contributes to lively conversations in multispecies studies of plant-human relations which have recently taken up the question of empire and botany (Batsaki, Cahalan, and Tchikine 2016; Subramaniam 2024; Ghosh 2021; Johnson 2019), Indigenous knowledge and colonial relations (Geniusz 2009; Nappi 2013; Digby, Ernst, and Muhkarji 2010), the impact of African diaspora herbalism on enslavers’ medicine in the United States ((Fett 2002; Carroll 2015), and the unacknowledged contributors to the creation of “western” science as we know it (Ellen, Parkes, and Bicker 2000; Harris 2015; Shorter and TallBear 2021; Asad 2002).

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, as scholars attend to the development of technologies of transporting plants, and knowledge about them, across oceans and mountains and deserts (Mueggler 2011; Keogh 2022). Historiographic attention to colonial botanical exploration (particularly through the materia medica of Hendrik van Rheede 1678 and de Candolle 1883) and ethnographic attention to contemporary practices like drug development and ecosystems conservation reveal the circulation of knowledge local to specific places and their medicinal practices with plants (Escobar 1998; Goldman, Nadasdy, and Turner 2011; Ellen 2016; Cooper 2007; Nigh 2002; Raffles 2002; Kimmerer 2015).

My research relies on a decade of anthropological fieldwork at herbalist education institutions, conferences and webinars, alongside archival research with support of the Consortium on the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew’s Ethnobotanical Collections; the Wellcome Collection; the F.C. Wood Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Othmer Library of Chemical History at the Science History Institute; and the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thus, my manuscript draws on a diverse array of primary and secondary sources, as well as ethnographic data.

As an ethnographer-herbalist I have engaged in in-depth participant observation at herbalist education centers and conferences; formal and semi-formal interviews with herbalist teachers, students, and clinicians; experiential engagement with medicinal plants and preparations; digital ethnography conducted with herbalists running online training courses; and offered small-scale public teaching on herbal medicine topics on request of local communities.

My historiographic work has included examining archival holdings of materia medica (c16-20), herbals (c19-20), pharmacopeia (c17-20), botanical exploration journals (c17-18), notes from chemistry lectures and materia medica lectures at United States medical schools (c19-20), and records of chemical experimentation (c19-20). I also examined historical maps of trade routes drawn for public consumption which help me spatialize plant relations in particular moments. The material from these archives has enabled me to begin constructing a timeline for botanists’, colonists’, and practitioners’ citational practices with plants.

I blend these methods as a scholar-practitioner in structuring this book as a contemporary materia medica. Like a single-plant materia medica, the text intersperses didactic content with experimental engagement and historical grounding to recount cultural histories of several plants, telling stories about harm and healing. I follow the materia medica as form and function through archival traces of ashwagandha, of boneset, of rose, and of sweet annie, drawing on ethnographic encounters as well as historical documents. The text intervenes in medical and environmental humanities, as well as in science studies, around what forms of knowledge are noted, valued, accessed and used, in what settings. I contribute to conversation among social scientists and activists concerned with environment and health in a context of climate change, and among scholars with interests in multispecies studies and ethics of care.

With its focus on medicinal plants and people who use them, its attempts to grapple seriously with both the realities of settler colonialism, and its appeal to public interest in complementary and alternative medicine, this book is well-placed to reach a wide audience and a variety of readers, from humanistic scholars to those interested in complementary medicine, to social justice advocates. I’m excited to submit a proposal to presses in early 2025, and look forward to ongoing conversation with anyone interested!