Learning North American Practices of Care with Western Herbalists

Ecologies of Friendship: Learning North American Practices of Care with Western Herbalists A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Charis Ford Boke December 2018 © 2018 Charis Ford Boke ECOLOGIES OF FRIENDSHIP: LEARNING NORTH AMERICAN PRACTICES OF CARE WITH WESTERN HERBALISTS Charis Ford Boke, Ph. D. Cornell University 2018 This ethnographic study of North American herbalists’ teaching practices is informed by nearly two years of in-depth fieldwork grounded in participant observation at “The Center,” a school of clinical herbalism in Vermont. At The Center, teachers understand human health as reliant on human relationships with what they call “obligate ecologies”—that is, the ecological others and places to which humans must practice accountability in order for all to thrive. They frame the work of accountability through language of “connection,” “communication,” and “friendship” across species, especially between plants and people. This dissertation argues that by teaching how to be a “friend to the plants,” herbalists enable students to imagine the entanglements of plants, people and environments, and then to act with reference to those relationships. Using ethnographic and historical methods to understand their direct sensory engagement with plants, I analyze their efforts to cultivate attentive relations across species as part of herbalists’ practices of care. Although the tools for critical analysis of what both “health” and “care” mean are available, provided by social and historical studies of technology and medicine, few studies to date have offered an in-depth analysis of health practitioners whose frame for teaching health care for humans also necessarily involves teaching care for relations with other-than-humans and environments. I offer a sustained engagement with the production of contemporary western iii herbalism as an “alternative” knowledge-practice to biomedicine. I position both the historical production of western herbalism, and the contemporary practices of teaching and learning it, in the context of the United States’ enduring the legacies, and ongoing practices, of settler colonialism and its entailments. And I unearth the ways that herbalists learn to care for human bodies because they learn to attend to, and care for, plants as friends and kin. I suggest that their pedagogies and practices lay bare American modes of knowing, encountering, and producing personal and environmental health today. iv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Charis calls Vermont home. She was raised in Weathersfield, a small town on the Connecticut River, near the base of Mount Ascutney in an area which, for several decades before her time there, was known for having more cows than people. Though her parents were neither born nor raised in Vermont, their decision to move there when Charis was 2 years old has had a meaningful impact on how she conceives of the world, and how her scholarship has been shaped. Over years of returns from other locales to Vermont, Charis’s writing, research, and attention to social issues has been continually shaped by her sense of belonging—and the tensions around that sense—at home in Vermont. Charis attended Weathersfield’s small elementary and middle schools, prior to their consolidation. She completed high school in 2001 at nearby Kimball Union Academy, first attending as a boarding student and then as a commuting or “day” student. In 2006 she earned her B.A. in English from Mills College in Oakland, California. After earning a Fulbright grant for her research in the anthropology of religion in Nepal (2007-2008), she went on to the University of Chicago where she completed her M.A. in Social Sciences in 2009. In 2010, she entered the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Cornell University, where her work was also supported by the American Studies Program. At Cornell in 2013, she completed her second M.A. and began the field research with organizers and herbalists in Vermont that led to this dissertation. In addition to her teaching at Cornell University, she has taught at the Community College of Vermont, with Where There Be Dragons’ gap year accredited programs, in formal and informal community settings around New England, and at The Center where her research is based. Her work as an educator is deeply linked with the research process, questions, and conclusions documented herein. v Any benefit this work generates, I dedicate to the plants, and to the people who care for them. vi The Remedies Half on the Earth, half in the heart, the remedies for all the things which grieve us wait for those who know the words to use to find them. Penobscot people used to make a medicine for cancer from Mayapple and South American people knew the quinine cure for malaria a thousand years ago. But it is not just in the roots, the stems, the leaves, the thousand flowers that healing lies. Half of it lives within the words the healer speaks. And when the final time has come for one to leave this Earth there are no cures, for Death is only part of Life, not a disease. Half on the Earth, half in the heart, the remedies for all our pains wait for the songs of healing. - Joseph Bruchac with permission from the author vii Acknowledgments As this dissertation germinated, sprouted, and grew, it had support from many different sorts of others. My first and most important thanks go to the plants—without whom, literally none of this would be possible. Thank you to the trees for giving so many of their bodies so I could edit this document; thank you to the medicine plants for keeping my heart, spirit, and body well enough to work; thank you to the small plants inside my house for letting me love you and look at you every day. Thank you to all the other plants who shape my life on this earth. Thank you to my excellent herbalist readers and co-theorists in Vermont and across the country—it is your passion, perspective, and guidance which has created the grounds for developing this work. Thanks to C. W., without whose support this work would not be completed. My thanks go to my family. Ideas and words have always been my bailiwick, but you made me take them outside, to weave them into the landscape of my own experiences, and I am grateful for that push. Along similar lines, collaborators and co-conspirators in social, environmental, and healing justice work facilitated my survival through some of the more difficult moments, as well as the joyous ones: Roger Benham, Shreya Bhattacharya, Liz Blake, Mario Bruzzone, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Danya Glabau, Jason Hirsch, Anna Grace Keller, Elizabeth Reddy, Melissa Rosario, Greg Rothman, Ashley Smith, Ly Sudorn, Ethan Winn: I thank you for critical support in thinking and practicing; with activism, justice work, and healing; in writing toward clarity, accessibility, and passion; and in supporting life lived, and written, and felt, on our own terms, together. I am grateful for all my teachers—the ones I have chosen, the ones who have chosen me, and the ones I did not recognize had taught me until after it was done. The ones in the academy, the ones in herbalism, the ones in many worlds, and the ones who do not know boundaries. viii Major Jackson, Truong Tran, Ajuan Mance, and William Paden for guiding my words early on; Peter Moran for guiding me, and yelling when it was warranted in the early stages of ethnographic engagement; Stacey Langwick, Adam Smith, Paul Nadasdy, and Aaron Sachs for believing in me from the first; Marcia Eames-Sheavly for connecting worlds. Your labors are a kind of love, and I can feel it. Thank you. A dissertation, or any extended effort, cannot be made without access to food, water, shelter, warmth, and companionship. Though I am not a fan of Maslow, these things are still true. I am deeply grateful for the financial support of various granting institutions. This research was made possible by generous support from the American Studies Program, the Society for the Humanities, the Institute for the Social Sciences, the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future/Oxfam, and the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University, as well as from the Francis Clark Wood Institute for the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Where would any writer be without an audience? In my case, I was incredibly lucky in the array of excellent readers and commenters on this text in its various stages. Thank you especially to members of two writing groups sponsored by the Society for the Humanities (Ecological Bodies and Writing Place): Ashley Smith, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Elizabeth Reddy, Molly Reed, Matthew Minarchek, and Hayden Kantor. Fellows and leaders in the Rural Resilience Research Program: Marygold Walsh-Dilley, Wendy Wolford, Rajeev Kumar Goyal, Sara Keene, Ted Lawrence, Chuan Liao, Kasia Paprocki, Paul Simonin, Brian Thiede provided inimitable assistance in early formulations of my research and writing. The writing tutors at Cornell’s Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines were indispensable for pointing out how the mechanical forms of my writing could better support the content development, and I thank ix them, especially Edward Curran and Stephen Kim. A deep bow of thanks goes Lucinda Ramberg—teacher, co-thinker, and strong, sensitive scholar, you offered sustenance for this process I did not get elsewhere. Fellow writers in Lucinda’s Writing Ethnography class encouraged my experiments, whether they worked or failed, and for that I am most grateful: Elif Sari, Alexandra Dalferro, Charlotte Howson, Jeffrey Mathias, Jinglin Piao, Justin Weinstock, and Tess Wheelwright. And finally, Eleanor Andrews has been a steadfast interlocutor and editor of this work in both formal and informal capacities for many years now; without her careful attentions to concept, organization, structure and articulation, it would not be what it is.

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