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Dear Wake Forest Social Science Research Seminar colleagues:
I apologize immediately for the length and the turgidness of this chapter draft. Let me here introduce the project and warn you about a few things that might be rough going and that I now want to change in this draft. The chapter is far from ready to go, so I’m hoping your questions and comments will help me streamline a full revision.
The book I’m working on while at the National Humanities Center will be called something like: Gathering Medicines in the Mountains: Nation, Body, and Knowledge in China’s Ethnic South. My co-author Lili Lai and I have been tracking a new (since 2005) central government initiative in China that encourages every one of the nation’s 55 minority nationalities (recognized ethnic groups) to research and institutionalize their own ethnic traditional medicine system. This is, thus, an unfolding history of knowledge production, state multiculturalism, ethnicity politics, local folklores, and state-supported medical pluralism. We are planning, and have partly written, other chapters on institutions, knowledge, bodies, and encounters. The chapter below is an ethnographic one, based on our five years of intermittent field research with seven minority groups in six provinces. It attempts to come to terms with the love of plants we encountered everywhere throughout our field research.
We were playing with a lot of abstract ideas while we were writing this, almost a year ago. Heidegger and some of his intellectual heirs on the nature of “things” is especially prominent, but we also played around with Chinese philosophical terms like yin and yang, efficacy (ling) and propensity (shi), gathering and scattering, and wildness (which is also a term in some American political theory we’ve been reading). We are not wedded to any of this theory, but we remain interested in showing how healing and botanizing practice in China’s mountains has its depths and a certain characteristic dynamic, or even dialectic. So, feel free to skip the abstractions, but if you have advice in these areas I’m all ears.
When we meet I can say more about directions in which we’d like to take this (already too long!) chapter and provide any background or clarification on the larger project. Thanks!
Chapter 4
Planted
For as long as anyone in the southwestern mountains can remember, there have been itinerant herbalists (草医) traveling through those parts. The uplands of Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi and Anhui have long been famous for their diverse plant resources and high quality herbal medicines. These lush forests and scattered terraces have long attracted healers and pharmacists from far away: herbalist travelers are often small businessmen who ramble on foot (manbu漫步) in medicine-rich areas, then sell what they gather to doctors. Even when they don’t do much business, they still gather knowledge as they collect medicinal plants, making both botanicals and information useful in a mobile medical practice and through field study.
Among other things, this travel is a kind of knowledge exchange. In Hubei, for example, a retired village doctor we visited attributed his extensive knowledge of local wild drugs to the frequent visits of herbalists who came every summer from Sichuan, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Street markets in every town still include vendors offering herbals in the form of dried or fresh whole plants, roots, fruits, and rhizomes; many of these small entrepreneurs travel among many markets in a region, offering their wares to all kinds of customers. Sometimes these vendors have only a few “especially effective” remedies for sale, like the “wild mountain bee’s honey” we saw for sale in Hainan. Even when market vendors have a wide selection of locally known herbal drugs for sale, they often specialize in one or two kinds that – they will argue – are of especially high quality and unique to their own collection.
Some larger towns and cities have permanent herb markets, such as the Shuijie Market in Nanning, the provincial capital of Guangxi, where vendors with identified ethnicities and formal licenses sell a wide variety of medicines from permanent stalls. One Yao nationality healer we spoke with in Shuijie market had traveled throughout the south as a herbalist when she was younger, and with her daughters (who work from other stalls in the same market) still frequently returns to their rather distant home area to replenish her supplies of wild drugs, with the help of herb-gathering relatives. Some market suppliers, in Nanning sandwiched between vegetable markets and specialists in dried, chopped, powdered and compounded herbals, offer fresh herbs along with cooking tips and advice about the mundane uses of their leafy wares in medicinal meals. Most market herbalists are not just salespeople, they also advise on illness and perform treatments. It is not unusual to see a client with part of his back bared and sterilized with medicinal wine sitting at the front of a herbalist’s stall receiving an acumoxa cupping treatment, or having a little blood let with a local needling technique. In Jinxiu town, for example, in a Yao nationality county, street-side herbalists consult on illnesses and how to use medicines at home, while also providing therapies such as massage, herbal plasters, and minor bloodletting, all with the apparent approval of the local department of health.
Of course it is not just outsider specialists and traveling salesmen who “climb the (local) mountains to pluck herbal medicines” (上山采药, shangshan caiyao). Almost every healer we spoke with in every region said that he or she ventured uphill to study and gather wild plants as often as possible, though some indicated that the press of clinical work, or physical problems of old age, or the receding forests, were making it impossible to go as often as they might wish. Though the practice may have been claimed as idealized wishful thinking in some cases,[1] some who were especially serious about their gathering – as a source of unique medical resources, and as a foundation of their healing authority and therapeutic efficacy – took long treks lasting a week or two, four or five times a year. On these expeditions, they said that they identified remote locations where specially-desired varieties of rare drugs flourished at particular seasons. Gathering carefully to ensure a good supply in the future, and traveling with only one or two trusted disciples, these local herbalists and healers cultivated a personal expertise linking the scattered growth of plants with the deployment of natural substances as drugs for human ailments. In this process, they not only assembled collections of exotic herbal medicines, they gathered together a practice of healing centered on their own knowledgeable, experienced, persons. No wonder those itinerant herbalists who have long traveled through plant-rich regions are respected by locals. With their experience of “going up the mountains to pluck,” they can become figures of an almost uncanny authority.
Everyone knows, for example, that in expeditions to gather in the wild, because it is necessary not only to recognize but to taste potential medicinal things to assess their character or quality, experts need to carry along with them other herbals known for their power as antidotes to poisons. A well-administered purgative, for example, could save an herbalist’s life when he is far from home. In speaking of their history of “going up the mountains to pluck herbal medicines,” healers literally draw near to and make a magical efficacy: they are known to take unknown things into their own bodies, attentively mark the results, learn how to tame the wild and the unknown into therapeutic procedures, and come to embody an understanding of (especially) plants.
In this chapter we reflect on plants and place, healing and everyday life, to imagine how people work with the qualities and efficacies of “wild” things. Seeing efficacious things – such as healers and drugs – as products of longstanding deliberate processes of gathering, assembling, refining, and transforming things, we show how mobilities and localities, circulations and rootedness, human and non-human propensities are woven together to build healing power in the southern mountains. This healing power is a complex thing going under the name of ling-efficacy [灵，灵验], (to be discussed below.) The activity of “climbing the mountains (shangshan) to pluck herbs (caiyao),” is central to this discussion. In this itinerant and highly valued form of work that gathers qualities and efficacies into therapeutically useful forms, people move through their mountainous region, looking for recognizable or interesting plants, animals, and minerals occurring – planted – in the wild. As they climb, examine, dig, taste, and pluck, they think about possibilities, taste and smell and feel for qualities, test for efficacies, and evaluate ways to usefully place new materials in existing and evolving meshworks of personal medical practices.[2]
As visiting anthropologists, we cannot fully imagine what any particular herbalist or healer knows or embodies after many years of trekking through nearby mountains to pluck herbs. We can, however, bear witness to a general fascination with natural medicines as things in themselves, a fascination shared by almost everyone we have met in the course of studying the development of nationality medicines in southern China: We met a rubber farmer in Hainan, for example, who collected dried herbals to help her pharmacy-student daughter. As she collects and carefully preserves leaves, roots, and flowers between sheets of newspaper, she denies knowing anything special about medicines. Only in showing us what she had gathered did she reveal her understated expertise about how to use these drugs to treat ailments that occurred in family members. Her collection reminded us of the one Yao medicine clinician Pan Lao showed us in a small hospital research unit. Dr.Pan lovingly paged through his well-documented plant presses to show us, beyond the pictures ranged along the wall, the plants themselves. And we have met other true experts, such as the Zhuang village doctor with a large private clinic whose rooftop is a small botanic garden. In our visit to him, a hospital pharmacist traveling with us was thrilled to find some plants he had only heard of but never seen. We have watched health department cadres in Yunnan clamber through streamside garbage to cut wild mint to take home, even uprooting a little for transplantation in urban pots. Traveling in Hubei with a historian of Tujia medicine and his driver brother-in-law, we found that the driver’s knowledge of, and interest in plants was as deep or deeper than the scholar’s. The two of them often clambered through roadside weeds to study an interesting plant they had spotted from the car. In general, during our travels with local researchers and local officials, no street market could be passed without our companions stopping to discuss medicines with the sellers of herbs. What looked to us like featureless chunks of wood became treasured finds: our Zhuang clinician friend Dr. Tan bought a woody chunk of sargentodoxa cuneata (da xue teng大血藤) and then carried it through all our visits for the rest of the day, pointing out its rarity and interesting features to everyone we met. Two Tujia medical historians, neither of them clinicians, display samples of important local herbs in their book-lined studies, happy to talk about the special qualities and efficacies congealed in these objects. And a farmer in Zhuang country goes uphill every weekend to gather herbs, carrying a camera to document plants in situ and adding the photographs to his laptop database. He not only sees patients in his village, he contributes his collected lore to the medical practice of his friend, a store-front doctor in town, who often joins the weekend rambles and shares this collector’s fascination with the plants themselves.
There is both an intimacy with the plant world made evident in these practices, and an attitude of humility toward it. Plants and other wild things participate in settled human lives as sustenance, instruments, and partners; they are tamed into social networks as collaborators alongside human devices and other non-human actors. The agency – and here we think in terms of ling-efficacy – of wild medicines is routinely enhanced and transformed through the careful labor of those few experts who have long climbed, plucked, handled, refined, sorted, and healed with natural drugs. These herbalists know a lot. But everyone, expert and amateur alike, talks about plants and even “the mountains” as only partly known. The most experienced gatherers are well aware that plants and other forest things harbor secrets; these objects withdraw some of their properties and characteristics from human view. This is why everyone we met was still so immensely curious, so sure that he or she could always find (and taste, and test, and use) new efficacies in the mountains.
Every plant lover in his or her gathering travels appreciates what might be called a vegetable mode of attention (to borrow from Thomas Csordas),[3] turning and growing in place, flowering and seeding toward a vast heaven-and-earth of light and water, wind and soil, grazing animals and curious humans, and at least 10,000 other lively things. When herbalists talk about the forests and paddies through which they travel in search of medicines, they seem to imagine a vast and still-mostly untapped natural-cultural world, full of vital things rooted in many places both near and far. As they touch and taste, disentangle vines and dig for roots among wild plants, they enhance their own dwelling in place and focus local powers toward their own ends, while acknowledging that the ten thousand things have ten thousand propensities of their own.[4]
Gathering Things (万物, 事物, 对象)
In this chapter, and especially in the personal stories we recount here, we appreciate the work of those who heal with natural drugs: their deliberation, attentiveness, and creativity. By attending to their practices of gathering – herbal drugs, knowledge, teachers, disciples, patients, experiences and selves – we also glimpse the world of ten thousand (scattered) things in which they do their work. The orientation of the healers who are our chief access to this scattered and gathering world incorporates a partial perspective on southern Chinese lived natures and cultures: partial because rooted in place, planted. In solidarity, then, with the linked passion for plants and concern to heal displayed by our interlocutors (researchers and healers alike), this discussion tries to sustain a focus on things and actions together, or things as actions.
In their similar efforts to resist the naturalization and universalization of what have long appeared as self-evident and inert objects, recent “speculative realist” philosophers have revived interest in a key essay by Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” (1971 [1951]). In the essay Heidegger opens with a denunciation of the modern flattening of space and time, the “distancelessness” characteristic of our highly mediated world. “Nearness” and its corollary farness, have been almost abolished, he suggests, in a regime of universal representation.[5] He writes: “Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly. We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things. But what is a thing?” (Ibid 164.) His answer to this question involves a focus on a distinction between objects (e.g., objects of attention, as in scientific representation) and things, which “stand” and “act” but have “subterranean depths” that “never become present to view” (Harman 2010:19). The thingness of the thing constantly escapes our grasp, while the object appears to be present-at-hand and knowable, usually as a discrete individual (named by a noun).[6]
To think things, and to discern actions, while writing in an English language that is strongly biased toward the noun, is not a simple task. As Judith Butler points out about the subject of social construction, “a certain suspicion toward grammar” is required (Butler 1993: 7). For one thing, we suspect the noun in English of performing a metaphysics that insistently reifies relations, processes, qualities, and all the other active things in the world to which words might be taken to – somehow or other – refer. The common-sense language ideologies of modern Anglophone materialism presume a one-to-one correspondence between words and world, discourse and non-discursive objects. Language performs a world for us in a thoroughly emergent way: If there is a word for it, we presume, the object referred to cannot be far away. This is the “analytico-referential” practice that Timothy Reiss has shown unevenly developing within the “patterning discourses” of early modern scientific and philosophical writing (1982). In this respect, structuralist and deconstructive critiques notwithstanding, in our everyday usages we have not progressed much beyond Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism of language and logic, or the discursive “empiricities” of 19th century science (Bentham 1843; Foucault 1970 [Order of Things]).[7] Further, as science studies scholars since Latour and Woolgar have argued, the sciences tend to perform a “splitting and inversion” through which an entity is produced in a (nominalizing) discursive-material practice and then posited as simplistically always already existing (Latour and Woolgar 1979). In this research on local medical practitioners and their foundational practices of gathering things for use against illness (going up the mountains to pluck), we do not encounter things as self-evidently always-already existing.[8] Rather we try to trace the pathways through which things are gathered into efficacious existence, and deployed in particular situations.