Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025    11:15am   115 Sibley Hall      Stacey Langwick, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Cornell 

This talk is part of a forthcoming book entitled, Medicines that Feed Us, in which Professor Langwick examines the shifting, multiple relationships between toxicity and remedy in the face of the environmental and health crises shaping the 21stcentury. Broadly, she is interested in how that which counts as “therapeutic” is shifting with the growing acknowledgment that the extractive relations, which fuel contemporary economies and animate modern life, undermine possibilities for ongoing survival.  In this seminar, Langwick thinks together with TRMEGA, a small vibrant NGO in northern Tanzania. TRMEGA’s plant(ing) remedies apprehend illness as an effect of long histories of dispossession, slow violence, and social-ecological abandonment. Herbal formulas intervene not only in depleted, suffering bodies but also in the affective and material relations that concretize people’s alienation from the forces of life. TRMEGA draws on traditional medicine, global herbalism, functional foods, agroecology, organic agriculture, and food sovereignty to cultivate forms of care that draw people closer to the soil and to each other. This work suggests a redefinition of the terms of health and healing. Lifestyle diseases are re imagined through what Langwick calls landstyles. Sharing seeds and cuttings, tending to compost, and building communities of multi-species support, are activities that together address the chronic injury and persistent vulnerability that shape the distribution of disease. Through the extension of their gardens, TRMEGA unsettles the boundaries between medicine and agriculture, redefines healing (as) land relations, and conceptualizes health as a quality of lushness in everyday life.