E–J

Miriam Pillar Grossi

S i m o n e L i r a d a S i lva
Ivi Porfirio
Caroline Amábile Vale dos Santos
Gabriel Darío López Zamora
Gabriela Alano Tertuliano
Maria Luiza Scheren
F i l i p e T c h i n e n e C a lu e i o
(Organização | Organization)

CONFERENCE
PROCEEDINGS
ANAIS
18TH IUAES WORLD CONGRESS
18º CONGRESSO MUNDIAL DE ANTROPOLOGIA
E–J

Florianópolis, 2018
 18th IUAES World Congress – Scientific Committee/ Comitê Científico
Antonio Augusto Arantes
(Ex-presidente ABA / Universidade de Campinas – Brasil)
Antonio Carlos Souza Lima
(Ex-presidente ABA / Museu Nacional – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – Brasil)
Bela Feldman Bianco
(Ex-presidente ABA / Universidade de Campinas – Brasil)
Faye Harrisson
(President IUAES / Universidade de Illinois – USA)
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
(Vice-President IUAES / Universidade de Brasília – Brasil and México)
Junji Koisumi
(Secretary IUAES / Osaka University – Japan)
Lia Zanotta Machado
(Presidenta ABA / Universidade de Brasília – Brasil)
Miriam Pillar Grossi
(Vice-President IUAES / Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – Brasil)
Mugsy Spieguel
(Treasurer IUAES / Cape Town University – South Africa)
Rajko Mursic
(Vice-President IUAES/ Ljubljana University – Slovenia)
Ruben Oliven
(Ex-presidente ABA / Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – Brasil)
Subhatra Chana
(Vice-President IUAES / Delhi University – India)

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Arte da capa | Cover design

Yuri Brah

I92c IUAES World Congress (18.: 2018: Florianópolis, SC)

Conference Proceedings = Anais [recurso eletrônico on-line]/ 18th IUAES Word
Congress = 18º Congresso Mundial de Antropologia; Miriam Pillar Grossi, Simone Lira da
Silva [et al] (organização/ organization) - Florianópolis: Tribo da Ilha, 2018.

Inclui referências bibliograficas

ISBN: 978-85-62946-96-7
Modo de acesso: https://www.pt.iuaes2018.org/conteudo/view?ID_CONTEUDO=766
https://www.iuaes2018.org/conteudo/view?ID_CONTEUDO=767
World (of) Encounters: The Past, Present and Future of Anthropological Knowledge

1. Antropologia – Estudo e ensino (Pós-graduação) – Congressos.

2. Antropologia – História. 3. Antropologia social. I. Grossi, Miriam Pilar. II. Silva,
Simone Lira da.
CDU: 391/397

Catalogação na publicação por: Onélia Silva Guimarães CRB-14/071

 18th IUAES World Congress:
World (of) Encounters: The Past, Present and Future of Anthropological
Knowledge
July 16–20, 2018

OP 193. Vital Experiments: Living (and Dying) with Pharmaceuticals after the Human

The Pharmaceutical Garden

Experimenting with medicinal
plants in Vietnam and Japan

Gergely Mohácsi
Osaka University

Abstract
The growing interest in the gut as a microbial niche and the emerging alliances around
“planetary health,” among other things, are constant reminders that our bodies are interspecies
infrastructures. At these crossroads, health becomes a more-than-human affair of cohabiting the
planet and our bodies with other living things. This is not necessarily something profoundly
new to ecological scientists and health experts, but as I will try to argue below, we need to come
to terms with the politics of the ongoing experimentation that this cohabitation envisions on
a planetary scale. Medicinal plant gardens are important sites where such tinkering is taking
place through the natural-cultural production of future pharmaceutical remedies. The gardens
in Japan and Vietnam that will be introduced in this paper are historically related to Chinese
medicine, but today they are experimental spaces cohabited by scientists, plants, indigenous
people, insects and activists, among others. They allow me to ask questions about the co-
implications of plants and humans in the development of pharmaceuticals and, more generally,
in the politics of cohabitation and future making. Focusing on the ongoing tinkering between
medicinal plants and humans in these gardens, I will ask how they are implicated through
different kinds of experiments in laboratories, hospitals and in society at large. The question of
how people and medicinal plants come to cultivate and be cultivated by one another may help us
to highlight the more-than-human stakes that have been emerging in public health during the
past decade, on the one hand, and are also implicated laterally in the idea of togetherness (kyōsei)
in contemporary Japanese human sciences.

Keywords: medicinal plants; gardens; multispecies ethnography; planetary health; experiment

1 Planetary health: after the universal human body

We used to call it “the universal human body” (LOCK and NGUYEN 2018, pp.
29–50).1 We were told that it is built from the same proteins encoded by exactly the

1 Paper presented at the IUAES Conference, Florianópolis, July 16-20, 2018 as part of the panel “Vital
Experiments: Living (and Dying) with Pharmaceuticals after the Human” organised and convened by Gergely

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same amino acids across our species. More recently, humanitarian efforts promised to
heal it anywhere in the world connected by what came to be called “global health” (ibid,
pp. 291–311). Our medications used to be designed to cure it anywhere: at home, in
the hospital, or in the forest. But then forests have started to shrink and those healing
remedies became more and more scarce. Or, as historian of science Hannah Landecker
observes in relation to the emerging crisis of antibiotic resistance, medical experts as well
as policy makers have gradually realized that “individual therapies targeted at single
pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far
beyond bodies” (LANDECKER, 2016, p. 19).
While we tend to think of medications as simply chemical compounds, the majority of
them, still in the 21st century, contain plants and medicinal herbs—either directly or indirectly.
Herbal extracts and medications derived from plants are only the most obvious among
them. Many synthetic drugs have been developed by studying the effect of compounds
that occur in plants used in traditional forms of healing. At the other end of the spectrum,
in plant molecular farming, genetically modified plants become “factories” to produce
molecules that are used in synthetic drugs.
When plants become factories and therapies counted as environmental events, it is
probably time to pay attention to the inextricable links between the health of our bodies
and our environment on a planetary scale. Here’s what a manifesto of planetary health in
The Lancet has to say about this:

Planetary health is an attitude towards life and a philosophy for living (…) Our
vision is for a planet that nourishes and sustains the diversity of life with which
we coexist and on which we depend. (HORTON, et al., 2014)

The growing interest in the gut as a microbial niche and the emerging alliances
around planetary health, among other things, are constant reminders that our bodies
are interspecies crossroads (or should I say infrastructures?). At these crossroads, health
becomes a posthuman issue of cohabiting the planet and our bodies with other living
things. This is not necessarily something profoundly new to ecological scientists and
health experts, but as I will try to argue below, we need to come to terms with the politics
of the ongoing experimentation that this cohabitation envisions on a planetary scale
(CHAKRABARTY, 2008; MYERS 2017; SUZUKI et al., 2016).
Herbal gardens are one of the important sites where such tinkering is taking place
through the naturalcultural production of future medicines and environments.

Mohácsi, Pino Schirripa and Akinori Hamada.

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2 Gardening the future?

As Natasha Myers claims in a yet to be published article:

Alongside farms, forests, and plantations, gardens are crucial sites for examining
the more-than-human dimensions of social, political and economic life, offering
profound insights into forms of governance, political economy and ecology,
industry, labor and more. Gardens are sites where people explicitly stage and
restage human relationships with nature. (MYERS, in press, p. 10)

In extension of this claim, I hold that the gardening of medicinal plants in this sense
can be seen as an attempt to align human well-being with the health of the planet. The
development of pharmaceutical products from herbs is a profound issue that allows us asking
questions about the inter-implication of plants, human bodies and environmental crisis.
In the past couple of years, through a comparative ethnographic research into the
cultivation and use of medicinal plants in Japan and Vietnam, I became interested in
these multispecies exchanges across medical traditions and clinical practices. Following
the routes of drug discovery from clinical trials to patient activism led me to various
herbal gardens cultivated by practitioners of Vietnamese and Japanese medicine (both
historically related to Chinese medicine), as well as by traditional healers in northern
Vietnam. These encounters allowed me to ask questions about the co-implications of
plants and humans in the development of pharmaceuticals.
Today, I will shortly introduce two of my field sites, which can hopefully open up the
space for questions about the politics of cohabitation and future-making in what, in this
session, we call “experimental societies”.

3 The Morino Herbal Garden, Nara

Where else to start thinking about future making practices than in a historical garden.
The reason I bring in this small and mostly abandoned garden to today’s discussion is
twofold. On the one hand, it is a historical record of the entanglement of plants and
humans in the future making experiments of cultivating herbs. On the other hand, I
am interested in how these knowledge practices have enabled the work of translation of
botanical and medical categories across different naturalcultural niches.2
The Morino Herbal Garden is a cultural (sic) heritage site in the mountainous
region of Nara Prefecture, Western Japan. Nara prides itself to be not only the cradle of

2
  My interest in this situatedness of knowledge practices has been strongly influenced by the early work of Donna
Haraway, especially HARAWAY, 1988.

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Japanese history and civilisation, but also the region where the systematic collection and
documentation of medicinal plants started along with the spread of Buddhist temples and
political infrastructures in the 7th century.
A short walk up a steep and winding path behind an arrowroot starch (kudzu)
processing factory leads from the entrance up to the garden which lies on a hillside. It
is home to roughly three-hundred different species of herbs planted in carefully laid
out rows making both maintenance and education easily manageable. Each plant bed
is labeled with names in Chinese, Japanese, and sometimes English, accompanied by
explanations of the plants’ medicinal properties, and the pharmaceutical products, mostly
herbal extracts, they yield.
Today, there is only one professional gardener and his wife left to take care of the
herbs. When I ask Hadano-san, the gardener, about the effect of these plants, he tells me
that the herbs gathered directly from the forest are certainly better for his ailing stomach.
Here, in the garden, however, he adds, one can see plants in a historical context and
compare the effects of herbs from China and those native to Western Japan.
The garden was laid down by Tosuke Morino (Saikaku), a merchant living in the
town in the beginning of the 18th century, who apparently took a great interest in medicinal
herbs. As a reward for his services of collecting the seeds of medicinal plants from all over
the country for the Tokugawa shogunate, he was awarded some rare and valuable seeds
from Korea and China. In a couple of decades, the garden became one of the dedicated
experimental sites of the concerted efforts of the shogunate to promote the domestic
production of herbs and drugs and to break out of the dependence on Chinese import of
medicinal materials (MICHEL, 2015).
Similar gardens have been established around the country in these years providing
the experimental infrastructure where physicians (and increasingly botanists) could
compare the climatic effects in China and Japan and track the development of plants from
close-up: their growth and possible cross-fertilisation could tell something about their
medicinal use for someone who had been preparing and prescribing these medications
for long years of clinical practice.3 The clash between different environments and bodies
were taken for granted as a problem to think through rather than something to be purified
into physiological and ecological implications.
Today, besides being a cultural heritage, the Morino Herbal Garden is also a living
laboratory for pharmacognosy, a branch of pharmacology that studies the medicinal use

3
  One Vietnamese doctor, for example, told me that occasionally he would take some of his patients to his home
garden as physicians of biomedicine would direct them to the pharmacy next door. “People tend to talk a lot about
their pains and suffering,” he says, “but I would also like them to embrace these herbs with all their senses before
the ingredients are blended up in a mixture.”

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of plants and other natural resources. Shimoda-san, a woman in her forties, is a member
of a researcher group from a nearby university. She hopes to find evidence that the
metabolic action of the crude drug tōki (当帰) used in kampo medicine can be enhanced
by a more sustainable form of cultivation of the plant with the same name (トウキ,
Angelica acutiloba) whose root is the raw material for the medication. Her early findings
indicate that intensive farming damages not only the soil, but the genetic structure of tōki
and that the planting of certain trees in the garden can actually prevent or even “heal”
such damages. It is probably not so difficult to see that the real heritage of this kind of
medical tradition is as much cultural as environmental and that healing, cultivating and
manufacturing drugs are entangled with suffering bodies and the future of the planet.

4 Bãi Giữa, Hanoi

The second site of this paper is, deliberately, at the opposite (Western) side of Chinese
medical tradition. This garden is located on a small island in the Red river in central
Hanoi, Vietnam. Under the famous Long Bien bridge (a symbol of innovative future in a
colonial past), and not far from Xom Phao, a floating village of day labourers lies Bãi Giữa
Song Hong, or the Middle Warp. A walk through the island plotted with kitchen gardens
and populated by some homeless people, drug users, a nudist community and other
outcasts of Hanoi society reminds me of Anna Tsing’s famous lines:

Ruins are now our gardens. Degraded (“blasted”) landscapes produce our
livelihoods. And even the most promising oasis of natural plenty requires
massive interventions to be maintained. (TSING, 2014, p. 87)

More than an oasis in the strict sense of the word, Bãi Giữa is rather a place where
new forms of human-plant relations are unfolding.
The plots of vegetable and corn that stretch through the island are mostly cultivated
by single farmers. Hoàng Phat is one of these agricultural entrepreneurs. He leases a tiny
land from the government, but while most of his neighbours invest in farming products,
he decided to plant herbal medicines, which, to him seem to be not only more profitable
in the long run, but also better for the regeneration of the soil. “Herbs can heal the land
as much as they heal the bodies of my patients,” he tells me. He is basically applying slash
and burn methods to improve the soil, but in the long run, Phat is looking for lands on
higher altitudes near Hanoi to extend the cultivation to more varieties and also to leafy
species. Meanwhile, he studies at a school for Vietnamese medicine to become a healer
himself one day. Based on his farming skills in general, the medical techniques he has
learnt in the school and from the healers he sells the plants, he has been developing his
own unique way of making use of this low quality and toxic urban land.

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 One important source of support in his effort to create a herbal garden in the middle
of the city came from a non-profit organisation called VietHerb. This group of young
and enthusiastic ethnobotanical and ecological experts has set out to protect traditional
ways of cultivating herbal medicines in a unique constellation of bringing plants and
people together. Rather than simply cataloging and conserving indigenous knowledge,
that has been a focus of many similar grassroots activism and scientific research, they are
forming new alliances by transplanting various types of rare medicinal plants into home
gardens and for harvesting. Phat’s garden therefore can be seen as an experimental site
of bringing medicinal plants to the improvement of public health and the environment.
The managing director of VietHerb is a young man in his late thirties called Nguyen
Cong Huan. He was educated as an agricultural engineer, so his interest lies just as much
in the therapeutical potential of plants as in seed quality, the tending of the soil and the
role of microbes in the decomposition after harvesting them. And while he knows well
how eager I am to learn more about these fascinating interspecies entanglements, most
of our coffee talks revolve around his anxiety of Chinese pharmaceutical and mining
companies who buy up vast lands leading to rapid deforestation in the North where
he was born and raised. They are both after trees and medicinal plants. Many of these
plants are understory herbs that actually return with the trees in the years that follow,
but he and his colleagues are worried about the future. On the one hand, he tells me,
toxic materials in the land will change the metabolism of the plants once and for all. On
the other hand, during these interim years, Chinese extracts will dominate Vietnamese
medicine and the knowledge of collecting them will be lost with the older generation of
healers. To avoid this scenario, new types of physicians, like Phat, are needed, who can
treat both patients and gardens. Hoan does not think that we can go back to an era where
plants were collected from the forest, but he believes that we can create gardens where
we can experiment with bringing the problems of sick people and polluted lands to bear
upon each other in a more-than-human way of healing.

5 The politics of togetherness (or kyōsei)

Herbal gardens are fascinating places where cultivating plants and healing bodies
emerge on two different, but not opposing, sides of a metabolic loop. Growing and
developing medications here becomes an ongoing experimentation with physiological
and social, political and environmental effects. As Stacey Langwick reminds us in her
ethnographic account of medicinal plants in Tanzania, “the health of the landscape and
the health of the body are not only read together, but they present as the same struggle
as people and plants intervene in each other’s unfolding.” And then she goes on asking,

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“what multispecies collaborations might articulate bodies that can endure even thrive;
can develop the ability to inhabit these [experimental] spaces?” (LANGWICK 2016:3;
added by the author). Thinking through the question of how do people and medicinal
plants come to cultivate and be cultivated by one another in herbal gardens may help
us to highlight the stakes that are involved in the issue of planetary health I began my
talk with. For better or for worse, this is not only a human problem (VAN DOOREN et
al., 2016).
As some critiques of the green modernist versions of the Anthropocene argue, the
metaphor of gardening is a dangerous one. To them, the garden, on a planetary scale, is
an unethical place because “Once we shift to a gardener’s mindset, it gives us too much
freedom to do whatever we want” (bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick, cit. KEIM, 2014). As for
me, rather than metaphors, I prefer to think of herbal gardens as sites where embodied
infrastructures are experimented with.
Medicinal plants may grow in the wild or are cultivated, but mostly somewhere in
between. In the garden, such relational encounters across difference are not only something
essential for them to exist, but they are also what make them scalable, to paraphrase Anna
TSING (2012). The researchers, doctors and healers I worked with are all too well-aware
of these encounters: they have to move their samples across cultural —Western, Chinese
and Vietnamese medicine—and ecological—forests, gardens, ecosystems—differences,
clinical sites, human bodies and laboratories in order to measure and compare their
efficacy.
Herbal gardens, in this sense, are places where humans and herbs tinker with
new forms of cohabiting and co-constituting each other’s’ worlds. Or, as Japanese
pharmacognosist, Takahashi Kyoko, writes about the Morino Garden, they are “concrete
manifestations of how humans have been living together with the natural environment
(hito to shizen to no kyōsei kankei) by not simply preserving, but creating and re-creating
biodiversity in the form of passing on their medical heritage to the next generations”
(TAKAHASHI, 2012, p. 2).4
You can catch the word kyōsei in the original version of this quote. Kyōsei in Japanese
stands for “co-existence” and is, as well, an emerging concept in the human sciences to
deal with the co-implications between humans and nonhumans. The origin of the noun,
actually is a verb, which means ”living together.” With disease for example, or plants
and animals. Or the planet. It is also a Japanese translation of the word “symbiosis,” and
sometimes also translated as “cohabitation,” so you may imagine that human-non-human

4
 「旧薬園は大和の自然環境を知るタイムカプセルに値する。江戸期、実際に栽培や自生していた有用植物の姿
を現在に伝える実体物であると同時に、人と自然との共生関係によって成立した生物多様性の現況が分析できる
後世に伝え残すべき医療文化遺産である」（髙橋, 2014, p. 339）。

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entanglements figure as an important research trend here. The challenge then is how to
bring the notion of kyōsei to bear upon our more rigid Western categories in an attempt to
open up the “spaces in which both plants and people come to cultivate and be cultivated
by one another” (MYERS, in press, p. 11).
Thinking with the idea of “togetherness” coined by Italian anthropologist Filippo
Bertoni may be helpful in re-translating this Japanese concept into our discussion on
experimental society and the politics of cohabitation. He says:

Togetherness is an open ended account of a coexistence and co-constitution that

is never closed or finished, and that does not necessarily involve coherence, but
is also inscribed in heterogeneous materialities…this togetherness is not about
forming consensus around a [unified] common good, but about the coexistence
of many different worlds that are not merely in agreement but hold together
and come apart in differently relational ways. (BERTONI, 2016, p. 5; p. 128)

Rather than thinking of such relations as something lost or damaged by climate

change or unhealthy diets, I am interested in the ongoing experiments in gardens,
laboratories, hospitals and in society, in which our comparative ethnographic methods
are laterally implicated.

References
Bertoni, Filippo. 2016. Living with Worms: On the Earthly Togetherness of Eating. Ph.D. Dissertation
submitted to the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry 35:197–222.

van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey and Ursula Münster. 2016. Multispecies studies: cultivating
arts of attentiveness. Environmental Humanities 8(1):1–23.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the
privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14:575–599.

Horton, Richard, et al. 2014. From public to planetary health: A manifesto. Lancet
383(9920):847.

Keim, Brandon. 2014 Earth is not a garden. AEON, September 18, 2014. https://aeon. co/essays/
givingup-on-wilderness-means-a-barren-future-for-the-earth (last accessed on June 3, 2018).

Landecker, Hannah. 2016. Antibiotic resistance and the biology of history. Body & Society
22(4):19–52.

Langwick, Stacey. 2016. “Healing in the Anthropocene”. Paper presented at the International
Workshop The World Multiple: Everyday Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds.
National Museum of Ethnography, Osaka, Japan. December, 2016.

Lock, Margaret and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, eds. 2018. An Anthropology of Biomedicine, Second
Edition. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Michel, Wolfgang. 2015. On the emancipation of materia medica studies (honzōgaku) in early
modern Japan. Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on the History of Indigenous Knowledge
(ISHIK 2015), 8-12 Nov 2015, Shenzhen, China, pp. 93−106.

Myers, Natasha. 2017. From the anthropocene to the planthropocene: Designing gardens for
plant/people involution. History and Anthropology 16(3):297–301.

—————— (in press) From edenic apocalypse to gardens against Eden: Plants and people in
and after the anthropocene. In Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, ed. Kregg
Hetherington. Durham: Duke University Press.

Suzuki Wakana, Atsuro Morita, Lyv Nyland Krause. 2016. Experimental Systems for the
Anthropocene. Gendai Shisō 44(5):202–213. 鈴木和歌奈・森田敦郎・リウ ニュラン クラウセ
2016「人新世の時代における実験システム：人間と他の生物との関係の再考へ向けて」『現代思
想』44巻5号：202–213。

Takahashi Kyoko and Morino Teruko. 2012. The Morino Medicinal Herb Garden and the Matsuyama
Illustrated Book of Herbs. Osaka University Press. 髙橋京子、森野燾子 2012『森野旧薬園と松山本
草：薬草のタイムカプセル』大阪大学総合学術博物館叢書 7、大阪大学出版会。

Tsing, Anna. 2012. On Nonscalability: The living world is not amenable to precision-nested
scales. Common Knowledge 18(3):505–524.

______. 2014 Blasted landscapes (and the gentle arts of mushroom picking). In The Multi-species
Salon, ed. Eben Kirksey, pp. 87–110. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[ VOLTA AO SUMÁRIO ]

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