A Note on Referencing
This article appeared in Issue One of Wort Journal, Summer ’23
To cite: Leo Qawas, ‘A Note on Referencing’ in Wort Journal, 1 (Ceredigion, Wales: self-published, 2023), pp. 6-7.
It is an intention of this journal to develop and nourish a culture of ‘deep referencing’. What do we mean by this? Acknowledging your sources is a standard practice for journals. It’s a way of directing readers to the right place should they wish to follow threads of interest, acknowledging others’ work and originality and expertise, and safeguarding against the dissemination of bad or false or made-up information. But there are critical perspectives to be taken and caution to be had in this. Who is it that we are platforming and which information is it that we are keeping in circulation? Where did it originate and what are the narratives and agendas and ideologies that it carries? Often it seems that referencing conventions keep certain information and ideas in circulation just by virtue of their being more easily referenceable within these systems and this circularity can be self-perpetuating. Often the people getting quoted or cited the most are those who already have a platform and are already visible and those who are already vested with the authority of institutional or societal approval. Sometimes academic referencing, with its system of peer review, feels like a boundarying practice as much as it does one of acknowledgement; one which maintains and replicates privileges as much as ‘standards’.
This kind of referencing sits uncomfortably with herbalism as a field of practice, which in the UK bears the legacy of a long and pernicious, often violent, history of the appropriation of knowledge from working class, women and racialised healers at the hands of Church, State, Institution and Empire. Within this history, the ‘authority’ of the written word was often weaponised against practitioners who held their knowledge within rich oral cultures; one means by which to prevent “itinerant and inexperienced old women from practising medicine”, as the London Royal College of Physicians aspired in 1583.[1] This history is one wherein, for centuries, textbooks continued to reference the Great White Male physicians of Ancient Greece, whilst suppressing and at the same time appropriating traditional knowledge. It is one wherein the healing traditions of colonised lands and their peoples were denigrated, plundered and exoticised, with knowledge-bearers written out of the records to have their wisdoms garbled by naturalists and anthropologists, and local plants stripped of their cultural contexts to be renamed after their ‘discoverers’. Herbalism’s present is one where many of these patterns still inform mainstream practice. It is needful that we challenge these age-old trends.
All contributors have been invited to reflect upon and to acknowledge, where relevant, appropriate, desired and consensual, their broader sources and inspiration. This is conceived as a political and an ethical practice. A practice of the recognition and honouring of all forms of knowledge and of the diversity of those who hold them, in line with herbalism’s roots as a ‘folk’ (which is to say a community-embedded) tradition. It is a practice that also has root in other kinds of folk tradition; traditional singing for example, where it is common to introduce a song by saying from whom you learned it, retaining a trace of its lineage within the retelling. In developing these ideas I found clarity and insight in the writings of herbalist and academic Wendy Siisip Geniusz and (her daughter and) academic Wendy Makoons Geniusz, both of whom write within a context of the effort to decolonise and reclaim for Anishinaabe use the botanical knowledge that was “both destroyed and preserved” through colonisation.[2] Siisip Geniusz and Makoons Geniusz both introduce their work with a detailed acknowledgement of their teachers and elders, in particular the medicine woman, Keewaydinoquay, from whom Siisip Geniusz learned, and they continue to reference her throughout. “I was raised with the anishinaabe teaching that one must always introduce the source of one’s teachings” writes Makoons Geniusz. She also references the context within which she is writing: “(a)ccording to our customs, I must explain who I am, to whom I am connected, and where I come from so that those listening to me will know the origin of my teachings. To do otherwise would be disrespectful to the many people who have sacrificed their time and energies to teach me these things.”[3]
The effort towards developing a practice of deep referencing in this journal is going to be an ongoing collective work in progress. We welcome any thoughts or suggestions; please get in touch at wortsandwords@gmail.com.
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1. Quoted in Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Massachussets: Harvard University Press, 2021), pp. 90-2.
2. The following books are both inspirational and highly recommended:
Wendy Makoons Geniusz and Annmarie Geniusz, Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonising Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009). (Quote: p. 3.)
Mary Siisip Geniusz, with Wendy Makoons Geniusz and Annmarie Fay Geniusz, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
3. Makoons Geniusz, Our Knowledge, p. xi and p. xv.