Interembodied Attentiveness: Vibrational Encounters between Clinical Herbalists and Medicinal Plants

I intend to present a chapter on my ongoing thesis that explores how clinical herbalists cultivate, experience and express their felt, synergetic relationships with medicinal plants; and how the interconnectedness of humans and plants contributes to a more ecological and embodied approach to wellbeing. This chapter particularly delves into the profoundly felt yet inexplicably lived experiences that emerge from human-plant relationships, focusing specifically on the emotional and sensory dimensions of communication between herbalists and medicinal plants. Many herbalists describe their interactions with plants in terms that resist articulation, often speaking of a “silent” or “invisible” way of knowing—one that transcends verbal communication and relies on heightened sensory awareness, particularly through affective listening. Relationships herbalists cultivate with medicinal plants are revealed to be emotionally intense and profound, rooted in a kind of intimate understanding that is felt in the body. Throughout my fieldwork, some herbalists describe this knowledge transmission as being mediated by “antennas” to capture the reciprocal ways human and plant bodies tune into one another. These antennas, I propose, act like invisible waves, vibrating with the intention to communicate. Drawing from ethnography, this presentation will explore the complexity and nuances of this invisibility, interpreted as a sense of attentiveness, which I describe as an interembodied connection: a shared form of knowledge that resonates and vibrates between human and herbal bodies.
Keywords: knowledge, listening, sensorial communication, interembodiment, human-plant relationship

Kei Nagaoka ∆ (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Sensing Poison and Herbs in Witchcraft: Ethnographic Study of Bodily Experience of Herbal Medicine in the Eastern Himalayas

This study explores the sensory experience of witchcraft among the Monpa people through ethnographic research in the Eastern Himalayas. They use wild plants for medicine, rituals, and food. Some herbs are significant medicines that save lives from witchcraft. The witch is assumed to place an invisible poison in the food of others and deprive them of their Buddhist merit (sonam) after they die. Scholars have reported the poisoning of witchcraft in different locations along the Himalayan borders between Tibet, India, Nepal, and Bhutan and discussed the local discourse of merit and the narrative of suffering. However, few mention the use of herbal medicines for its treatment. By analyzing their senses of herbal medicine in the local context, I argue that witchcraft is not merely a discourse or narrative but a multisensory experience of living in an environment with poison and herbs. This study contributes to the medical anthropology of the senses and sensory ecology ethnography by discussing how people experience herbs through their senses, how their experience interconnects with the feeling and memory of the poison and witches at the border, and how they make sense of the uncertain world based on their bodily sensibility toward non-human species. Keywords:Multisensory experience, Human-plant relationship, Tibetan Buddhist community, Bodily sensibility, Memory

Juliana España Keller ∆ (Studio Arts, Concordia University, Canada) Entering Into a Sonic Intra-Active Quantum Relation with Plant Life

In the speculative research of plant bioacoustics, one enters into a sonic intra-active relation, by humans with non-human beings (plant life), activated through acoustic wave signals emitted by plants to createelectronic patterns of sounds composed by humans and emitted by machines. Plants emit sound waves at relatively low frequencies of 50–120 Hz. Experimenting with patching and modulation by tracking these sonic lines of data can indeed lead to unique sonic experiences that tap into the universe’s musicology. It is fascinating how we can interact with sounds on such a deep level to create acoustic energy. We are and have always been attached to the universe in a relational processual way. We are all interconnected with plant life vibrating at different internal frequencies. This article focuses on a symbiotic relation between humans and plant life as an acoustic shimmering ecology – to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter as a morphological force that(re)shapes, (re)affirms our sonic intra-relations to the natural world. This proposition is molecular and metaphysical, as sound matter is of a qualitative multiplicity in the quantum field of listening. By acknowledging ontologically that cosmopolitics brings into relation different practices, practitioners, and the non-human (they assemble in a field of forces and intensities), I argue that there is no sovereign power under which all modes of existence can be organized, and there is no meta-language through which one can master the diversity of all discursive or material practices; but there are intra-relations in which one can get lost in a quantum field of sonic matter by moving into the cracks of the sensorium and the plant biosphere, which includes Indigenous voices. The alterity of plant life is daunting froman eco-feministmaterialist position in that relationships are the default state of existence and sonic experiences uncover alternative or additional explanations in a (post)phenomenological world – which is embedded in the stuff of acoustics in the many ways humans hear the world. Thus, to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter necessitates understanding how sound matter intra- performs through a sonic language – where intra-relations with plant life have complex boundaries for humans. As a creative practitioner, how does one define the mutually beneficial engagement in plant communication with creative musical encounters? Entanglement is messy and a becoming with the universe as a philosophical sonic meditation and worlding. This entails expanding on sensing plants as cosmogonic beings, world builders, and we, perhaps, are the byproducts of the lives of our vegetal others.
Keywords: acoustic ecologies, plant bioacoustics, environmental humanities, symbiosis, the biosphere