In the most recent phase of environmental knowledge research, researchers have begun to focus their attention towards the dynamic aspects of indigenous knowledge and, thus, processes of knowledge transmission and creation have become central to current environmental and ethnobotany research. Plants, Health and Healing constitutes an important contribution to this literature, providing new approaches for exploring human–environment interactions and perceptions.

The book is clearly divided into three sections (History, Anthropology, Plant Portraits): two chapters for each part, for a total of six interesting contributions, plus the editorial introductions. The co-authors have different approaches to medicinal plants, due to their different backgrounds and interests (medical anthropology, ethnobotany, history of botany, clinical medicine). What is in common is the focus on practices of using plants for maintaining health: thus, the main purpose of this book is to investigate how people relate to plants and how they transform them into cultural artefacts. Engaging with ‘the materiality of plants’ (p. 3), all the contributors aim not to provide long lists of local names and usages of plants, as the majority of research does in this field; rather, they are all interested in considering plant knowledge in its context, as embedded into practice and social relations. Plants are turned into cultural artefacts when they become part of human practice (in this case medicinal practice): in Hsu's words, ‘plants have materiality in that they emerge from relations and establish or rebuild relations’ (p. 21) and hence the related knowledge ‘arises in negotiation with the materiality of the plants and the human bodies with which they interact’ (p. 16).

In the introduction, Elisabeth Hsu summarizes the major issues in medical anthropology (disease/illness, personalistic/naturalistic, biology/culture, genetic/social dichotomies) in relation to both ethnomedicine and ethnobotany disciplines. With a background in biology and social anthropology, Hsu discusses two different perspectives, biological and cultural: she criticizes the empirical way of knowing – typical of the natural and biomedical sciences – based on a relation between a detached observer and the object (the natural world), and she challenges the cognitive assumptions that individuals and environment are discrete and pre-given entities. Instead, Hsu argues that human beings perceive and interact with their environment (in this case plants) in an unmediated and direct way, in embedded and ‘practice-based modality’ (p. 2), supporting her argument with reference to different theories on the unity and continuum between human beings and the natural world (the ‘indivisible totality’ as Ingold puts it) by Latour, Gibson, Ingold and Grasseni. Abandoning the idea – common to many ethno-biological studies – of pan-human cognitive schemas, Hsu suggests the concept of ‘common sense’: she thus rehabilitates and elaborates Reid's notion of common sense in a way that points in the same directions as Ingold and Latour. For Hsu, common sense is not a self-confident prepositional attitude, a mode of thinking; rather it is a ‘mode of doing’ (p. 34): in certain situations of daily life, people engage with their environment by doing and this happens ‘in a taking-for-granted manner’ (p. 35).

The materiality of plants and ‘the common sense modality’ of interaction between human beings and plants are issues covered in all the six chapters of the book. From an historical point of view, Harris discusses, through the case study of the anti-malarial quinine in Europe, the interactions between people and non-native plants in medicinal practice; he puts into question the stereotype that each people has its own medicinal plants and he concludes that because of continuous borrowing, trading and exchanging of plants between people, all medical systems incorporate plants from varied provenence but they do not (most of the time) integrate also the cultural knowledge and applications related to these non-native plants (Chapter 1, pp. 53–82). In Chapter 2, Hsu explores the history of Artemisia annua (the anti-malarial plant) in China; she questions the concept of ‘natural herbs’, arguing that herbal remedies are not just natural drugs, but rather cultural artefacts, and that uses and drug preparations can differ and change over time and place (Chapter 2, pp. 53–130). From an anthropological perspective, Freedman investigates the uses of plants in shamanic practice in the Peruvian Upper Amazonia, pointing out that the material plant world is gendered, and hence each plant has the male and female counterparts (Chapter 3, pp. 135–178). In the following chapter, Geisler and Prince's goal is to show how plant knowledge related to childhood illness is embedded into practice, ‘intrinsic to social situations’ in western Kenya; the authors assert that this knowledge cannot just be acquired through verbal and objective transmission; rather, knowledge transmission results from a network of interactions: human–non-human; people–place; body–environment (Chapter 4, pp. 179–223). From bio-prospecting and ethnopharmacology approaches, the last two chapters present the different knowledge systems resulting from the shift from an indigenous use of a plant to the international market uses, looking in particular to the medicinal virtues of Ginkgo biloba (Chapter 5, pp. 229–226) and to caffeine-containing plants (Chapter 6, pp. 262–301).

This book is innovative in its approach to studying medicinal plants. Thanks to the different backgrounds of the co-authors, this book provides a multidisciplinary overview on medicinal plant research: looking at plants from both a biological (Biomedical Sciences) and cultural perspectives (Medical Anthropology), the book overcomes this distinction, and certainly concurs with Lock's concept of ‘local biologies’, according to which ‘biologies are not universal but vary with locality, and are affected by culture’ (p. 14). The book fulfils an important task in clearly drawing attention to the dynamic and practical aspects of environmental knowledge. It is recommended as essential reading for all researchers interested in people–plant interactions and especially in plants in medicinal practice.