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Enchanting with paperwork: epistemic pluralism and Western herbalists in the United States.

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Title: Enchanting with paperwork: epistemic pluralism and Western herbalists in the United States.
Authors: Boke, Charis (AUTHOR)
Source: Anthropology & Medicine. Jun-Dec2025, Vol. 32 Issue 2-4, p106-124. 19p.
Subjects: Documentation, Herbal medicine, Ethnology research, Fieldwork (Educational method), United States. Food & Drug Administration, Ethnology, Theory of knowledge, Practical politics
Geographic Terms: United States
Abstract: Relying on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Western herbalists this paper attends to herbalist narrative and practice around training for, assessing, and valuing embodied knowledges about plants and plant extracts. It describes the ways that herbalists in the Northeast of the United States strive to remap the world of organoleptic, bodily knowledge into and across regulatory knowledge forms like chemical assays, recordkeeping practices, and machines like the mass spectrometer or spectrophotometer. The paper argues that their remappings constitute an herbalist epistemic pluralism, outlining this as a key mode of practice for Western herbalists, whether in the classroom or in the production facility. This mode of doing technoscience otherwise imagines and enacts a world where many ways of knowing are possible. Ethnographic evidence demonstrates how herbalist epistemic pluralism both instantiates and undergirds attempts to achieve legal legibility for embodied knowledge with Federal regulatory organizations and indicate ways in which epistemic pluralism may be conceptually useful to anthropologists beyond attention to Western herbalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Copyright of Anthropology & Medicine is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
Database: Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="JN" term="%22Anthropology+%26+Medicine%22">Anthropology & Medicine</searchLink>. Jun-Dec2025, Vol. 32 Issue 2-4, p106-124. 19p.
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  Data: Relying on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Western herbalists this paper attends to herbalist narrative and practice around training for, assessing, and valuing embodied knowledges about plants and plant extracts. It describes the ways that herbalists in the Northeast of the United States strive to remap the world of organoleptic, bodily knowledge into and across regulatory knowledge forms like chemical assays, recordkeeping practices, and machines like the mass spectrometer or spectrophotometer. The paper argues that their remappings constitute an herbalist epistemic pluralism, outlining this as a key mode of practice for Western herbalists, whether in the classroom or in the production facility. This mode of doing technoscience otherwise imagines and enacts a world where many ways of knowing are possible. Ethnographic evidence demonstrates how herbalist epistemic pluralism both instantiates and undergirds attempts to achieve legal legibility for embodied knowledge with Federal regulatory organizations and indicate ways in which epistemic pluralism may be conceptually useful to anthropologists beyond attention to Western herbalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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  Data: <i>Copyright of Anthropology & Medicine is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.</i> (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
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        Value: 10.1080/13648470.2025.2604006
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        Text: English
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      – SubjectFull: Herbal medicine
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      – SubjectFull: Ethnology research
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      – SubjectFull: Fieldwork (Educational method)
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      – SubjectFull: Practical politics
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      – SubjectFull: United States
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              Text: Jun-Dec2025
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