Archiving Healing, Ritual, and Transformation with Spices
In this interview with KCRW's Good Food, World Arts and Cultures/Dance professor David Shorter details the four decades of collecting that led to The Archive of Healing, the conversations it has sparked, the herbal discoveries within, and the push to decolonize our spice diets and pantries.
Led by Dr. David Delgado Shorter, UCLA’s The Archive of Healing is a digital database that draws on folklorists and anthropologists, documenting traditions and rituals of wellness, including the use of many spices.
(Photo courtesy of Canva.)UCLA professor David Delgado Shorter has launched The Archive of Healing, one of the largest databases of medicinal folklore from around the world. The collection includes hundreds of thousands of entries that address a broad range of health-related topics, from midwifery and menopause to common colds and flus. The site aims to preserve Indigenous knowledge about healing practices, while preventing that data from being exploited for profit. Much of the entries involve food with healing properties, from traditional remedies involving ginger and turmeric, to others using salt cod and goosegrease.
Shorter speaks with Good Food about the archive’s history, the conversations it has sparked, and the herbal discoveries within.
KCRW: What is the Archive of Healing, Ritual, and Transformation?
David Delgado Shorter: “The archives started as a means for a previous professor at the university to collect sayings, colloquialisms, we used to call them folktales. There's a very gendered way to say it, which is ‘old wives’ tales,’ things that people used to talk about that were related to healing, health, wellness, or curing.
And so he was really documenting things like incantations. ... But within this process, he actually started collecting information about not just spices, but food ways, rituals. These ways that, in a broader sense, I've come to call ‘the archive of healing,’ rather than what they previously called something like ‘traditional medicine.’” – Evan Kleiman, Apr. 30, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the KCRW website.
Read more about David Shorter.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
