Charis Boke | Dartmouth College (original) (raw)

Papers by Charis Boke

Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence‐based Medicine. Abigail A. Dumes, Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, 360 pp

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Ecologies of Friendship: Learning North American Practices of Care with Western Herbalists

Plant listening: How North American herbalists learn to pay attention to plants

Anthropology Today, 2019

23 CHARIS BOKE Charis Boke is an independent scholar of medical and environmental anthropology ba... more 23 CHARIS BOKE Charis Boke is an independent scholar of medical and environmental anthropology based in Vermont, where she teaches at the Community College of Vermont. Her email is charis. boke@gmail.com. What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants – and if so, how? This article offers a partial response to these questions by drawing on my research with Western herbalists (as they call themselves) in the rural northeast of the United States. The research was undertaken at a school of clinical herbalism which I will call ‘The Center’, where the pedagogical practices of herbalists rely on cultivating attention to and attitudes of responsibility towards plants. I focus here on pedagogical practices that use ‘the doctrine of signatures’ as a framework for how herbalists learn to pay bodily attention to plants.1 As I will demonstrate, herbalists attune their bodies to the outward manifestations of medicinal plants through a variety of learning experiences and learn to sense the kind of power, capacity and agency plants may hold. I argue that the pedagogical modes that these herbalists use to help their students attend to plant lives can teach us how to attend broadly to cross-species difference. The ways that herbalists know how to attend to and thereby enable communicative relationships of different sorts with plants have several sets of implications. I highlight two in particular here: first, implications for how humans understand the scope of human life and its interconnectedness with other kinds of life on this planet; second, implications for cross-disciplinary multispecies studies, as herbalist practices open up a more vibrant set of possibilities for what we might mean when we talk about connection, communication and relationship between humans and other-than-humans. In brief, the broader context of this cross-species attention lies in the question of how humans and other creatures can learn to mutually thrive in what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro might call ‘multinatural communities’ in a time of ecological disruption on a damaged planet. The doctrine of signatures is a teaching tool that The Center uses to lead students through a process of attuning their senses to particular elements of the world – to plant lives, their environments and various human bodily experiences with plants and their preparations. Taste, smell, vision – ‘organoleptics’ – and the sense of touch – ‘haptics’ – help herbalists construct personal, sensate, bodily attunements to particular medicinal plants. Students learn to attend ever more finely to the details of plants and plant worlds by engaging their own bodily experiences with living plants, or with teas and tinctures made from medicinal plants. As those experiences build on one another and as the students’ daily contact with plant materials and living plants increases, individual students develop their own attunement to particular plants, practices and needs. In this process they construct an ‘affective scaffolding’ (to use anthropologist of science, Rachel Prentice’s felicitous term) that will lead them towards an understanding of plant capacities and human bodily health as inextricably ‘ecological’ (Prentice 2013). In order to analyze the doctrine of signatures as a teaching tool for connecting herbalists’ bodily experiences of plants in the world to the practice of botanical medicine, I build on Prentice’s acknowledgement that education and training are as much about educating the affect of the individual into appropriate contextualization as about tuning bodily attention to difference. If affect is ‘presubjective without being pre-social’, as William Mazzarella suggests (2009: 291), intentionally practising to develop a sensory attunement to plants plays a key role in crafting that scaffolding for herbalists (Mazzarella 2009; see also Massumi 2002). Such an attunement positions plants as agentic and capable of communication; herbalists attempt to mitigate the species divide by opening up their understanding of what plants are capable of. I consider the efforts of Western herbalists to communicate with plants in the context of Natasha Myers’ suggestion that humans may become ‘plantalized’ in their relations with plants as much as or more than they may ‘anthropomorphize’ plantbeing (Myers 2015; see also Hustak & Myers 2012), and with Eduardo Kohn’s admonition that one must pay attention to the various ‘modalities of communication’ that emerge across species (Kohn 2013). Herbalists at The Center attempt to ‘open’ themselves up ‘to others’, as Myers might put it, in the process of learning how to work with medicinal plants. Working with plants as communicative others matters for their understanding of health as a process which is always already entangling human bodies, environments and other-than-humans. These practices are responses to contemporary social realities – in particular, a heuristic divide between humans and…

Resilience's problem of the present: reconciling social justice and future-oriented resilience planning in the Transition Town movement

Resilience, 2015

Using ethnographic data gathered from more than two years of fieldwork in a rural Vermont ‘Transi... more Using ethnographic data gathered from more than two years of fieldwork in a rural Vermont ‘Transition Town’ – a social movement oriented toward building resilience – this article examines how the conceptual groundwork of ‘resilience’ makes it difficult to work on socio-economic concerns in the here-and-now. It offers a close examination of the material objects that are interwoven with ‘building resilience’ in Transition Towns organising, creating the affective infrastructure on which the proliferating crises of the future are constructed. The desirable objects of resilience, via this affective infrastructure, serve to suture the imagined past with the imagined future, weaving hope, fear, grief, guilt, anticipation and excitement into resilience practice as inextricable parts of the work of resilience. And in turn, this suturing elides the necessary work for socioeconomic justice in the present moment. I suggest that, as a result of this problem with the present, the resilience concept makes it difficult to reconcile the commitment to social justice with resilience-building work. Finally, I touch on the possibility that weaving in an ‘ethic of care’ to considerations of resilience can assuage some of the shortcomings of the concept.

Plant Time

An Ecotopian Lexicon

An ethic of care for resilience

Introduction Though wide-ranging and in-depth studies have been conducted about many religious ri... more Introduction Though wide-ranging and in-depth studies have been conducted about many religious rit ual pmcticcs and siles inlhe Kathmandu Valley. there is a relative paucity of information about those ubiquitous and fascinati ng shrines which house aniconic representations of divinities. For the purposes of this study. the term 'aniconic'-lilcrally, 'without icon' OT 'without imagc'refcrs to ;my object or area that is venerated in the manner of a deity. but does nOI represent the deity by means of anlhropomoll>hized physical resemblance. In other words. any slOnc which has no [.Ice or body carved into il but is itsetf revered as a ho ly object. any niche in a wall which is worshipcd. :my natural boulder or rocky e(tifice which is regarded as a sacred emanation. sel foriginated or not. of ;1 d ivinity or mul tiple divinities: all o f these fall under the category ·;lI1icol1ic.· This swdy's relevance lies not only in the fac t th:l t there has been littl...

The aim of this paper is to further discussion on the changing landscape of Nepal’s socioeconomic... more The aim of this paper is to further discussion on the changing landscape of Nepal’s socioeconomic world as seen through the lens of religious worship sites and practices. Anthropologists of religion in Nepal have a long history of exploring worship sites and practices, and the ways in which those sites and practices integrate, and integrate into, Nepali cultures and societies. As Nepal is increasingly connected to an economically, politically and socially globalizing world, a fresh review of worship sites and practices is in order—not only from a strictly ethnographic, documentary perspective, but from a perspective that considers how the rapid changes in the structure of Nepal’s economic, political and social structures are affecting, and being affected by, religious realities. This paper will address two connected themes. The first looks at the economic relationships implicit in the interaction between worshiper and temple space, and questions how those economic (and thereby, soci...

Plant Listening: How North American Herbalists Learn to Pay Attention to Plants

Anthropology Today, 2019

What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants... more What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants – and if so, how? In this article, I engage with Western herbalists in the rural northeast of the United States as they transmit knowledge about medicinal plants. I focus on herbalist teachings which use ‘the doctrine of signatures’ as a framework for the learning process of attuning bodily attention to plants. Herbalist modes of learning how to attend to, and thereby enable, communicative relationships of different sorts with plants have implications for the ways that humans understand the interconnectedness between human life and other kinds of life. Cross‐disciplinary multispecies studies may learn from herbalist practices as well, opening up a more vibrant set of possibilities for thinking about the connection, communication and relationship between humans and other‐than‐humans. The broader context of this cross‐species attention lies in the question of how humans and other beings can learn to attend to one another and mutually thrive in a time of environmental disruption.

Care

A reflection on the kinds of cross-species care that herbalists in the United States cultivate, o... more A reflection on the kinds of cross-species care that herbalists in the United States cultivate, offering an opportunity to think more intimately about a moment many are calling the Anthropocene. Find it as part of the Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen on Cultural Anthropology's website: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/803-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen

Resilience's problem of the present: reconciling social justice and future-oriented resilience planning in the Transition Town movement

**For those without institutional access beyond the paywall, please email for full-text of author... more **For those without institutional access beyond the paywall, please email for full-text of author's version**

Using ethnographic data gathered from more than two years of fieldwork in a rural Vermont ‘Transition Town’ – a social movement oriented toward building resilience – this article examines how the conceptual groundwork of ‘resilience’ makes it difficult to work on socio-economic concerns in the here-and-now. It offers a close examination of the material objects that are interwoven with ‘building resilience’ in Transition Towns organising, creating the affective infrastructure on which the proliferating crises of the future are constructed. The desirable objects of resilience, via this affective infrastructure, serve to suture the imagined past with the imagined future, weaving hope, fear, grief, guilt, anticipation and excitement into resilience practice as inextricable parts of the work of resilience. And in turn, this suturing elides the necessary work for socioeconomic justice in the present moment. I suggest that, as a result of this problem with the present, the resilience concept makes it difficult to reconcile the commitment to social justice with resilience-building work. Finally, I touch on the possibility that weaving in an ‘ethic of care’ to considerations of resilience can assuage some of the shortcomings of the concept.

Going Native At Home: Explorations in Method- and Note-ology

This blog post on Allegra Laboratory is a place where I start to think through my presence as a V... more This blog post on Allegra Laboratory is a place where I start to think through my presence as a Vermonter doing research in Vermont. What, I ask, are the experiential contours of doing research at home? How do my relational commitments shift when I will never not be "going back"? And what are the personal and political consequences of these contours and commitments?

This paper presents two parallel suggestions drawn from my work with participants in the Transit... more This paper presents two parallel suggestions drawn from my work with participants in the Transition Towns movement in the northeast United States. There, I observed a connection between desires for localness and a particular set of sensibilities around the realm of the political. I present material that forwards a discussion about the connection between the local and the political as concepts and practices. Specifically, I attend to the ways in which the local as a site for action and identification comes to allow claims to "a-political" action in response to what are recognized as fundamentally political problems--economic instability, climate change, and peak energy. I foreground conversations with farmers who produce food for local-foods farmers markets and cooperative grocery stores, alongside conversations among activists about the nature and valence of resilience-building organization in the Transition Towns model. I articulate some ways in which the local as a site for action can both enable and disable critiques and actions understood as political in nature.

Talks by Charis Boke

Plants, People, Care: Troubling the Scale of the Planet in Contemporary Western Herbalism

This is a video recording of a talk I gave for the STIGMA Speaker Series at Yale School of Forest... more This is a video recording of a talk I gave for the STIGMA Speaker Series at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, April 2017. In it, I discuss the ways that the embodied practices of herbalists offer a way to think about "the planetary" that renders it present in day-to-day experience. I offer a gentle critique the utility of "scaling up" as a heuristic to understand individual interactions with climate change, the Anthropocene, and the planet, suggesting that herbalists' embodied engagements with the material world can teach us something about how to think (feel) the planet right here, right now.

Drafts by Charis Boke

InAttentive Bodies, 2009

A series of meditations on airports: affect mediation, bodily sensation, attention, power. After,... more A series of meditations on airports: affect mediation, bodily sensation, attention, power. After, and with, Kathleen Stewart, Zach Savich.

Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence‐based Medicine. Abigail A. Dumes, Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, 360 pp

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Ecologies of Friendship: Learning North American Practices of Care with Western Herbalists

Plant listening: How North American herbalists learn to pay attention to plants

Anthropology Today, 2019

23 CHARIS BOKE Charis Boke is an independent scholar of medical and environmental anthropology ba... more 23 CHARIS BOKE Charis Boke is an independent scholar of medical and environmental anthropology based in Vermont, where she teaches at the Community College of Vermont. Her email is charis. boke@gmail.com. What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants – and if so, how? This article offers a partial response to these questions by drawing on my research with Western herbalists (as they call themselves) in the rural northeast of the United States. The research was undertaken at a school of clinical herbalism which I will call ‘The Center’, where the pedagogical practices of herbalists rely on cultivating attention to and attitudes of responsibility towards plants. I focus here on pedagogical practices that use ‘the doctrine of signatures’ as a framework for how herbalists learn to pay bodily attention to plants.1 As I will demonstrate, herbalists attune their bodies to the outward manifestations of medicinal plants through a variety of learning experiences and learn to sense the kind of power, capacity and agency plants may hold. I argue that the pedagogical modes that these herbalists use to help their students attend to plant lives can teach us how to attend broadly to cross-species difference. The ways that herbalists know how to attend to and thereby enable communicative relationships of different sorts with plants have several sets of implications. I highlight two in particular here: first, implications for how humans understand the scope of human life and its interconnectedness with other kinds of life on this planet; second, implications for cross-disciplinary multispecies studies, as herbalist practices open up a more vibrant set of possibilities for what we might mean when we talk about connection, communication and relationship between humans and other-than-humans. In brief, the broader context of this cross-species attention lies in the question of how humans and other creatures can learn to mutually thrive in what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro might call ‘multinatural communities’ in a time of ecological disruption on a damaged planet. The doctrine of signatures is a teaching tool that The Center uses to lead students through a process of attuning their senses to particular elements of the world – to plant lives, their environments and various human bodily experiences with plants and their preparations. Taste, smell, vision – ‘organoleptics’ – and the sense of touch – ‘haptics’ – help herbalists construct personal, sensate, bodily attunements to particular medicinal plants. Students learn to attend ever more finely to the details of plants and plant worlds by engaging their own bodily experiences with living plants, or with teas and tinctures made from medicinal plants. As those experiences build on one another and as the students’ daily contact with plant materials and living plants increases, individual students develop their own attunement to particular plants, practices and needs. In this process they construct an ‘affective scaffolding’ (to use anthropologist of science, Rachel Prentice’s felicitous term) that will lead them towards an understanding of plant capacities and human bodily health as inextricably ‘ecological’ (Prentice 2013). In order to analyze the doctrine of signatures as a teaching tool for connecting herbalists’ bodily experiences of plants in the world to the practice of botanical medicine, I build on Prentice’s acknowledgement that education and training are as much about educating the affect of the individual into appropriate contextualization as about tuning bodily attention to difference. If affect is ‘presubjective without being pre-social’, as William Mazzarella suggests (2009: 291), intentionally practising to develop a sensory attunement to plants plays a key role in crafting that scaffolding for herbalists (Mazzarella 2009; see also Massumi 2002). Such an attunement positions plants as agentic and capable of communication; herbalists attempt to mitigate the species divide by opening up their understanding of what plants are capable of. I consider the efforts of Western herbalists to communicate with plants in the context of Natasha Myers’ suggestion that humans may become ‘plantalized’ in their relations with plants as much as or more than they may ‘anthropomorphize’ plantbeing (Myers 2015; see also Hustak & Myers 2012), and with Eduardo Kohn’s admonition that one must pay attention to the various ‘modalities of communication’ that emerge across species (Kohn 2013). Herbalists at The Center attempt to ‘open’ themselves up ‘to others’, as Myers might put it, in the process of learning how to work with medicinal plants. Working with plants as communicative others matters for their understanding of health as a process which is always already entangling human bodies, environments and other-than-humans. These practices are responses to contemporary social realities – in particular, a heuristic divide between humans and…

Resilience's problem of the present: reconciling social justice and future-oriented resilience planning in the Transition Town movement

Resilience, 2015

Using ethnographic data gathered from more than two years of fieldwork in a rural Vermont ‘Transi... more Using ethnographic data gathered from more than two years of fieldwork in a rural Vermont ‘Transition Town’ – a social movement oriented toward building resilience – this article examines how the conceptual groundwork of ‘resilience’ makes it difficult to work on socio-economic concerns in the here-and-now. It offers a close examination of the material objects that are interwoven with ‘building resilience’ in Transition Towns organising, creating the affective infrastructure on which the proliferating crises of the future are constructed. The desirable objects of resilience, via this affective infrastructure, serve to suture the imagined past with the imagined future, weaving hope, fear, grief, guilt, anticipation and excitement into resilience practice as inextricable parts of the work of resilience. And in turn, this suturing elides the necessary work for socioeconomic justice in the present moment. I suggest that, as a result of this problem with the present, the resilience concept makes it difficult to reconcile the commitment to social justice with resilience-building work. Finally, I touch on the possibility that weaving in an ‘ethic of care’ to considerations of resilience can assuage some of the shortcomings of the concept.

Plant Time

An Ecotopian Lexicon

An ethic of care for resilience

Introduction Though wide-ranging and in-depth studies have been conducted about many religious ri... more Introduction Though wide-ranging and in-depth studies have been conducted about many religious rit ual pmcticcs and siles inlhe Kathmandu Valley. there is a relative paucity of information about those ubiquitous and fascinati ng shrines which house aniconic representations of divinities. For the purposes of this study. the term 'aniconic'-lilcrally, 'without icon' OT 'without imagc'refcrs to ;my object or area that is venerated in the manner of a deity. but does nOI represent the deity by means of anlhropomoll>hized physical resemblance. In other words. any slOnc which has no [.Ice or body carved into il but is itsetf revered as a ho ly object. any niche in a wall which is worshipcd. :my natural boulder or rocky e(tifice which is regarded as a sacred emanation. sel foriginated or not. of ;1 d ivinity or mul tiple divinities: all o f these fall under the category ·;lI1icol1ic.· This swdy's relevance lies not only in the fac t th:l t there has been littl...

The aim of this paper is to further discussion on the changing landscape of Nepal’s socioeconomic... more The aim of this paper is to further discussion on the changing landscape of Nepal’s socioeconomic world as seen through the lens of religious worship sites and practices. Anthropologists of religion in Nepal have a long history of exploring worship sites and practices, and the ways in which those sites and practices integrate, and integrate into, Nepali cultures and societies. As Nepal is increasingly connected to an economically, politically and socially globalizing world, a fresh review of worship sites and practices is in order—not only from a strictly ethnographic, documentary perspective, but from a perspective that considers how the rapid changes in the structure of Nepal’s economic, political and social structures are affecting, and being affected by, religious realities. This paper will address two connected themes. The first looks at the economic relationships implicit in the interaction between worshiper and temple space, and questions how those economic (and thereby, soci...

Plant Listening: How North American Herbalists Learn to Pay Attention to Plants

Anthropology Today, 2019

What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants... more What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants – and if so, how? In this article, I engage with Western herbalists in the rural northeast of the United States as they transmit knowledge about medicinal plants. I focus on herbalist teachings which use ‘the doctrine of signatures’ as a framework for the learning process of attuning bodily attention to plants. Herbalist modes of learning how to attend to, and thereby enable, communicative relationships of different sorts with plants have implications for the ways that humans understand the interconnectedness between human life and other kinds of life. Cross‐disciplinary multispecies studies may learn from herbalist practices as well, opening up a more vibrant set of possibilities for thinking about the connection, communication and relationship between humans and other‐than‐humans. The broader context of this cross‐species attention lies in the question of how humans and other beings can learn to attend to one another and mutually thrive in a time of environmental disruption.

Care

A reflection on the kinds of cross-species care that herbalists in the United States cultivate, o... more A reflection on the kinds of cross-species care that herbalists in the United States cultivate, offering an opportunity to think more intimately about a moment many are calling the Anthropocene. Find it as part of the Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen on Cultural Anthropology's website: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/803-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen

Resilience's problem of the present: reconciling social justice and future-oriented resilience planning in the Transition Town movement

**For those without institutional access beyond the paywall, please email for full-text of author... more **For those without institutional access beyond the paywall, please email for full-text of author's version**

Using ethnographic data gathered from more than two years of fieldwork in a rural Vermont ‘Transition Town’ – a social movement oriented toward building resilience – this article examines how the conceptual groundwork of ‘resilience’ makes it difficult to work on socio-economic concerns in the here-and-now. It offers a close examination of the material objects that are interwoven with ‘building resilience’ in Transition Towns organising, creating the affective infrastructure on which the proliferating crises of the future are constructed. The desirable objects of resilience, via this affective infrastructure, serve to suture the imagined past with the imagined future, weaving hope, fear, grief, guilt, anticipation and excitement into resilience practice as inextricable parts of the work of resilience. And in turn, this suturing elides the necessary work for socioeconomic justice in the present moment. I suggest that, as a result of this problem with the present, the resilience concept makes it difficult to reconcile the commitment to social justice with resilience-building work. Finally, I touch on the possibility that weaving in an ‘ethic of care’ to considerations of resilience can assuage some of the shortcomings of the concept.

Going Native At Home: Explorations in Method- and Note-ology

This blog post on Allegra Laboratory is a place where I start to think through my presence as a V... more This blog post on Allegra Laboratory is a place where I start to think through my presence as a Vermonter doing research in Vermont. What, I ask, are the experiential contours of doing research at home? How do my relational commitments shift when I will never not be "going back"? And what are the personal and political consequences of these contours and commitments?

This paper presents two parallel suggestions drawn from my work with participants in the Transit... more This paper presents two parallel suggestions drawn from my work with participants in the Transition Towns movement in the northeast United States. There, I observed a connection between desires for localness and a particular set of sensibilities around the realm of the political. I present material that forwards a discussion about the connection between the local and the political as concepts and practices. Specifically, I attend to the ways in which the local as a site for action and identification comes to allow claims to "a-political" action in response to what are recognized as fundamentally political problems--economic instability, climate change, and peak energy. I foreground conversations with farmers who produce food for local-foods farmers markets and cooperative grocery stores, alongside conversations among activists about the nature and valence of resilience-building organization in the Transition Towns model. I articulate some ways in which the local as a site for action can both enable and disable critiques and actions understood as political in nature.

Plants, People, Care: Troubling the Scale of the Planet in Contemporary Western Herbalism

This is a video recording of a talk I gave for the STIGMA Speaker Series at Yale School of Forest... more This is a video recording of a talk I gave for the STIGMA Speaker Series at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, April 2017. In it, I discuss the ways that the embodied practices of herbalists offer a way to think about "the planetary" that renders it present in day-to-day experience. I offer a gentle critique the utility of "scaling up" as a heuristic to understand individual interactions with climate change, the Anthropocene, and the planet, suggesting that herbalists' embodied engagements with the material world can teach us something about how to think (feel) the planet right here, right now.

InAttentive Bodies, 2009

A series of meditations on airports: affect mediation, bodily sensation, attention, power. After,... more A series of meditations on airports: affect mediation, bodily sensation, attention, power. After, and with, Kathleen Stewart, Zach Savich.