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Paper short abstract

Individuals exercise creativity in their healing practices. This paper explores how individuals use the vernacular medical practice of home remedies to enact agency in their healing and connect with their communities.

Paper long abstract

In the proposed paper, I will explore home remedies as a facet of vernacular medicine, an eclectic and dynamic set of healing practices that operate alongside and in tandem with official medical systems. Both vernacular and official health systems operate in localized cultural contexts and influence the ways that individuals and communities relate to their health. The individuals I interviewed during my fieldwork cultivated personalized repertoires of home remedies often based on ingredients, recipes, and belief systems available in their local environment and practiced in domestic, kitchen-table settings. My contributors endowed these remedies with particular cultural meaning as practices related to the restoration and maintenance of their health. Enacting their personal home remedy practices enabled my contributors to exercise agency in their healing. These practices also relied upon supportive relationships as pathways of transmission, as well as sites of healing in their own right. The care inherent in the kin and community ties that my contributors described often contributed to the significance of home remedies in their lives. In relationship with people, plants, and the land, my contributors enacted the healing practice of home remedies to respond to their individual and communal health needs.