Toxic Remedies: On the Cultivation of Medicinal Plants and Urban Ecologies

Abstract

Growing concerns with air-pollution, contaminated drinking water, and deteriorated sewerage infrastructures contributed to an increasing environmental awareness in Vietnam during the past decade. At urban sites, such as herbal gardens in Hanoi, these ecological concerns converge with medicinal itineraries of East Asian herbal medications and the health of a rising middle-class. In these emerging chemosocial configurations, public health becomes an environmental issue, and the city holds out the promise of a resilient space of planetary health. To illustrate such lateral movements, this article focuses on the cultivation and transplantation of medicinal plants in central Hanoi. Thinking through the question of how people and herbs come to cultivate and be cultivated by one another, I argue, helps to understand the public health stakes of chemosocial infrastructures in a rapidly urbanizing Vietnam and, more generally, in urban transformations throughout Asia. At stake both in the transformation of plants into pharmaceutical products and in the modes of transplanting knowledges and methods from one world (or discipline) to another is the lateral mobility between East Asian medical practices and STS methodologies.

Keywords:

• Vietnam chemosocial infrastructures
• East Asian medicines
• urban gardening
• pharmaceutical pollution
• lateral ethnography

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to sincerely thank friends and members at VietHerb and the residents of Bãi Giữa who have shared their professional and personal experiences with me. Without their generous hospitality this research would have been not only impossible, but greatly irrelevant. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the University of Toronto, Osaka University, at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan (Minpaku), as well as at the 2019 inter-congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) in Poznań, Poland. I am indebted to the participants of these events for their helpful suggestions and critical questions, including Naoki Naito, Atsufumi Kato, Mei Zhan, Michelle Murphy, Satsuka Shiho, Anders Blok and Moe Nakazora. Finally, many thanks to Casper Bruun Jensen for encouraging me to write this article and for his always keen and patient editing of my ever-changing revisions.

Notes

¹ According to a survey conducted in 2004, the material origin of the products was either wild-harvested herbs (26%), cultivated crops (20%) or medicinal plants imported from China (54%) including commonly used remedies such as Angelica dahurica, Angelica sinensis, Achyranthes bidentata, Rehmania glutinosa, and the fungus Ganoderma lucidum (Nguyen and Nguyen 2008:51).

² As part of ongoing historical heritage projects in the Old Quarter, facades of the street have been restored by the district since 2013 amidst the ongoing resistance and distrust of local shop owners (Hanoi Times, 22 February 2019, “Hanoi and Toulouse work together on restoring Old Quarter” http://hanoitimes.vn/hanoi-and-toulouse-work-together-on-restoring-old-quarter-1859.html; last accessed on 1 February 2020).

³ All personal names in this article are pseudonyms to assure informants and friends the anonymity I promised them during my research.

⁴ Asthma, waterborne diseases and malaria are only among the more obvious illustrations of such entanglements of environmental and human health. As a major report of planetary health published by The Lancet reminds us, “major sources of chemical contamination and waste include pesticides from agricultural run-off; heavy metals associated with cement production; dioxins associated with electronics recycling; mercury and other heavy metals associated with mining and coal combustion; butyl tins, heavy metals, and asbestos released during ship breaking; mutagenic dyes, heavy metals, and other pollutants associated with textile production; toxic metals, solvents, polymers, and flame retardants used in electronics manufacturing; and drug or pharmaceutical pollution through excretion in urine and improper disposal” (Whitmee et al. 2015, 1982; emphasis added).

⁵ On “Asia as a method,” see the Introduction to this special issue.

⁶ For a rich historical study of ancient Chinese and Greek medicine with a comparative approach, see Kuriyama (1999); for a comparative discussion of the effectiveness of herbal and synthetic medications in Eastern and Western medicine, see Satō (2014).

⁷ Well-known examples include the potlatch, a feast practiced by indigenous peoples of North-America and made famous by Marcel Mauss’s essay The Gift ([1925] 1970); or latah, a state of possession originally observed in different parts of Southeast Asia and eventually made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV (Winzeler 1995). For a more reflexive discussion on the anthropological uses of Amerindian perspectivism, see Viveiros de Castro (2004).

⁸ For sociologists of scientific knowledge (SSK) symmetry has been understood as a collapse of the long-standing distinction between true and false claims (Bloor 1976). Later, actor-network theory (ANT) proposed to extend this symmetry to human and non-human actants calling it “the principle of generalized symmetry” (Callon 1986: 200).

⁹ A more elaborate discussion of these issues with further examples from East Asia can be found in the special issue on “Traveling Comparisons: Ethnographic Reflections on Science and Technology” published in EASTS (Mohácsi and Morita 2013); for a general discussion of the subject, see Matei Candea’s recent work on the ethnographic method of comparison (Candea 2018).

¹⁰ See note 9 above.

¹¹ For a discussion on the political-economic context of technoscientific modernization on the peripheries of China, see Chiang (2017) and Jensen (in this volume).

¹² The ASEAN Post, 24 October 2019, “Hanoi’s pollution exposes growth risks.” https://theaseanpost.com/article/hanois-pollution-exposes-growth-risks (last accessed on 1 February 2020).

¹³ A recently edited volume, Food Anxiety in Globalizing Vietnam, provides excellent case studies to highlight these issues around food safety and economic transformation (Ehlert and Faltmann 2019).

¹⁴ See also the edited volume Health in Ecological Perspectives in the Anthropocene on environmental health issues with an East and South-East Asian focus (Watanabe and Watanabe 2019).

¹⁵ On leaking infrastructures, see also Eitel’s article in this special issue.

¹⁶ For quantitative studies of pharmaceutical contamination, see Fick et al. (2009) on antibiotics in India; Azuma 2013 on anti-influenza medications in Japan; Bean et al. (2014) on anti-depressants in the UK.

¹⁷ Việt Nam News, 25 November 2018, “Nostalgic Future: Turning Banana Island into Green Lungs of Hà Nội.” https://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/480370/nostalgic-future-turning-banana-island-into-green-lungs-of-ha-noi.html#YxjGD2sjlTcWrCqP.97 (last accessed on 1 February 2020).

¹⁸ According to his own estimate, Mr. Phú produces c. 600 kg of root, c. 200 kg of leaves and 50 kg of seeds in a year on this land (oral communication).

¹⁹ On arsenic contamination of the Red River in Hanoi, see Winkel et al. (2011); on the environmental effect of antibiotic residues in Vietnam, including the same river, see Harada (2018).

²⁰ The often cited and probably best known take on the issue is Jacques Derrida’s famous essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida [1972] 1981).

²¹ In a recent historical monograph on the early globalization of the Vietnamese pharmaceutical industry under French rule, Laurence Monnais has thoroughly discussed the colonial legacy of this mobility (Monnais 2019); see also Monnais, Thompson, and Wahlberg (2012) for comparative case studies on the same topic.

²² For a different take on the scaling potential of herbal medicines, see Mohácsi (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gergely Mohácsi

Gergely Mohácsi is an anthropologist based at Osaka University, Japan. His recent research has primarily focused on the ecological implications of public health interventions and drug development in Western Japan and Northern Vietnam. His scientific work has been published in English, Japanese, French and Hungarian.