Charis Ford Morrison Boke

|Lecturer
Academic Appointments
  • Research Scientist

  • Lecturer

Connect with Us

News, April 22, 2025

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Contact

8022308454
HB 6047

Department(s)

Anthropology

Education

  • Ph.D., Cornell University 2018
  • M.A., University of Chicago 2009
  • B.A., Mills College 2006

Selected Publications

  • 2022  Book Review, "Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine. Abigail A. Dumes. Duke University Press, 2020, 360 pp." Medical Anthropology Quarterly. June 23, 2022

  • 2020 "Care." In Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen, eds. Howe, C. and A. Pandian. Earth, Milky Way: punctum books.     

  •  2020 "Unsettling Herbalism" Guest Editor, The Ethnobotanical Assembly. Issue 6, Autumn.

  • 2020 "Regrounding Practice, Unsettling Knowledge," Editorial Introduction to series, The Ethnobotanical Assembly, Issue 6, Autumn.

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Speaking Engagements

  • 2022 Fellows' Seminar, Consortium on the History of Science, Technology and Medicine       

  • 2022 Food Sovereignty, Food Justice panel at Honors College Annual Symposium, Saint Michael's College, Colchester, VT 

  • 2020 "Poison: Evidence and the Production of Boundaries in Medicine," Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine, University of Kansas at Kansas City     

  • 2019 "Poison: Substance and Act," The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.       

  • 2018 "Body as World: Practices of Herbalism in Contemporary North America." F.C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.            

  • 2017  "Plants, People, Care: Troubling the Scale of the Planet in Contemporary Western Herbalism." STIGMA Speaker Series "The Healing Forest in the Anthropocene." School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University 

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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