Abstract

This thesis examines how knowledge about health and wellbeing is produced through embodied, sensory, and relational practices in Quebec. Based on multi-sited fieldwork—including in-depth interviews, apprenticeship-based participant observation, and travel across herbal landscapes—my immersive ethnographic research traces how clinical herbalists learn to care, come to know and collaborate with medicinal plants. Informed by interdisciplinary scholarship in medical anthropology, ethnobotany, multispecies and sensory studies, I engage with posthumanist critiques of anthropocentrism to explore how human-plant relationships are expressed, experienced, and generate healing knowledge that challenges dominant biomedical epistemologies. Across four chapters, I discuss the practices of herbalism in different social, cultural, and political contexts, trace practitioners’ diverse pathways into the field, and examine the affective and interdependent dynamics of human-plant relationships. By centering herbalists’ lived experiences and narratives, this research reveals how medicinal plants are engaged not merely as ingredients for remedies but as living, responsive beings who participate in the co-creation of health. By foregrounding the sentience and agency of medicinal plants, I explore clinical herbalism as both a form of care and a mode of knowing that contributes to broader conversations on multispecies entanglements, relational healing practices, and the sensory dimensions of care. This ethnography aims to understand how health emerges as an intricate weave of love, reciprocity, interdependence, and transformation—where humans and plants cocreate experiences of wellbeing through shared attentiveness and presence.