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

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.