"Making Medicine" withSalvia divinorum

Competing Approaches and Their Implications

Bibliographic Data

ID4564472
AuthorsPaja Faudree (0000-0002-5802-7391, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume39
Issue7
Pages582-596
Publication date2020-10-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedical Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0145-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-5882
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01459740.2020.1814772
PMID32960103
OpenAlexW3087739182
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited46

The psychoactive plant Salvia divinorum has long been used medicinally by Indigenous people from southern Mexico, the only place where it is endemic, and is now studied by pharmaceutical researchers. I analyze competing ways the two groups "make medicine" with salvia, attending simultaneously to material/embodied and semiotic/linguistic dimensions of those practices. I introduce two concepts - stripping and enrobing - to show that differences in how the groups interact with salvia have ethical and political consequences. Those repercussions matter because salvia is but one of many plants important to marginalized groups whose ties to them are threatened by international medical interests

Engineering ethics · Salvia · Traditional medicine · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Race, Genetics, and Society

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