To Read between the Lines

<h3>Abstract</h3> To what extent can we read between the lines of pharmacopeias that standardized global knowledge in order to access the knowledge displaced or erased in the process? How might an attention to “substances” over “medicaments” call attention to how pharmacopeias have incorporated, appropriated, and universalized local medicinal knowledge and the knowledge they have obscured as a result? Using a series of historical vignettes from the fields of ethnobotany in the 1980s and 1990s, this essay navigates historiography related to Indigenous pharmacopeias and bioprospecting. We note two dueling impulses in research around Indigenous medical plant services and knowledge systems—a tendency for <i>universalization</i> and local <i>cosmologization</i>—and attempt to move forward toward substantive bioprosperities.