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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork in Czechia, this paper analyzes a situation described by local herbalists: plants begin growing near the home of a person who needs their healing properties. These encounters are considered a prompt to develop discussion of intentionality beyond anthropocentric categories.

Paper long abstract

Humans depend on plants with which they share air, landscapes, and households. Despite the constant entanglement of human and vegetal life, plants remain elusive objects for the methods of multispecies ethnography (Hartigan, 2018). Drawing on ongoing anthropological research on the use of herbs in Czechia, this paper examines how herbalists generate knowledge about herbs through intimate relations with them and how their practices can inform mapping the possibilities and limits of multispecies ethnography.

In my research, one type of claim is frequently repeated: plants begin growing near the home of a person who needs their healing properties. Various herbalists observe specific species of herbs suddenly appearing around their homes—species new to the place and with healing properties relevant to the herbalist’s health problem. Herbalists regard this situation as plants offering their medicinal power to humans. In this paper, I consider these everyday encounters as a prompt to develop discussion of intentionality beyond anthropocentric categories.

Building on multispecies ethnography of human–plant entanglements (e.g., Myers, 2018; Hartigan, 2018; Shepard, 2022), I ask: What can multispecies ethnography learn from mundane herbalism when examining plants’ intentionality? This paper analyzes the “art of noticing” (Tsing, 2015) practiced by herbalists and conceptualizes their attention to plant growth as recognition of “body intentionality” (Kim, 2020). Herbalists value plants without reducing vegetal life to mechanical movements and acknowledge that plant bodies are capable of intentions even without consciousness comparable to the human mind.