ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Pharmaceutical Overwriting of Regional Ethnicity and Botany: Indigenous Medicinal Plant Knowledge in Western China

• In Event: Roots and Remedies: Global Histories of the Pharmaceuticalization of Herbal Knowledge III

English Abstract

In this paper, I argue the overwriting of regional indigenous ethno-pharmaceutical knowledge in Western China as Han-ethnic, Daoist and part of one omnipresent, changing pharma-industry. This happened during the process of writing modern national and regional pharmacopoeia in Chinese. While extracted active ingredients emerged in the long twentieth century along with Taylorist industrialisation, the history of medicinal plants and science in China adds a special twist. East Asian historical literature, plus isolated scientific taxonomy of useful plants, and TCM drug names are a great “Chinese” traditional element in world phyto-pharmacy and botany.

But this historical model for alternative regional contributions to medicinal world knowledge has limitations. This paper returns to origins of this “experience” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to discover overwritten histories of the rural industry, botanical science and indigenous authors of materia medica (bencao). Based on my ethnographic fieldwork and on history of science and pharmacy in the Northwestern Qinling region, I will use two regional materia medica reference works as examples where locals want to write as world botanists. Yet, in my fieldwork since 2014 and personal historiographies of field-working Daoists, philologists and doctors, I have encountered a healthcare system that is echoing fundamental changes of medicinal markets and rituals since the 1950s. I will focus on three facets: 1) grassroots knowledge surveys of medicinal plant knowledge in Western China; 2) provincial reference works; and 3) ritual aspects of ethno-pharmacy in a remote mountain-environment. A region of materia medica science appears while indigenous origins disappear.

Author

• Lena Springer, King’s College London