Ginseng Diggers won two awards in the past month, the James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature award, given annually by the American Botanical Council, and the Appalachian Studies’ Weatherford Award for Nonfiction. I couldn’t be more honored. To have my book listed alongside the other Duke and Weatherford winners is something that I will always cherish. I’d like to thank my wonderful family for their unwavering support. I’d like to thank Richard Starnes, my advisor at WCU who first validated my research interests, and my PhD advisor at UGA, John Inscoe, without whom I would have never come close to finishing this book. And, of course, I’d like to thank the good folks at the University Press of Kentucky, specifically Patrick O’Dowd, for their support and encouragement through this process. They put out one hell of a good-looking book.
I’d like to highlight some of the thoughtful and kind words by the Weatherford Award judges, all of which are very excellent Appalachian scholars.
Katherine Newfont: This is a remarkable--even transformational--work of Appalachian history. Through painstaking research in 19th-century records Manget reveals a world we had previously barely glimpsed, one that tied thousands of Appalachian people to global markets while also enabling them to maintain significant control over the terms of their own labor. Appalachian communities' ties to forests--both culturally and economically--predate extractive industry and are now re-emerging as coal and other industries increasingly abandon the region. At this pivotal moment Manget offers a brilliant exploration of ginseng, a forest product long used to sustain Appalachian livelihoods. This is a "usable past" indeed. This study could hardly be more impressive or more timely for the region.
Loyal Jones Appalachian Center: Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia opens a new way to think about Appalachian harvesting habits. It begins to illustrate how the interconnection between East Asian markets and Appalachian medicinal remedies influences the perception of Appalachia while intimately addressing topics on gender roles, class relations, forest use, and commons management. Manget introduces ginseng’s history in Appalachian culture by allowing for the staple root to showcase interdisciplinary impacts on the world while remaining focused to its origins, Appalachia, and how the root influences Appalachian culture today. He manages to incorporate original ideas about interdisciplinary understanding with a simple root that is at its core is ideas about interdisciplinary understanding with a simple root that is at its core is Appalachian which brings Appalachia to the center stage of global interconnection. It’s written so well that you’d think this unmatched understanding of Ginseng was simple knowledge, but it’s the first of its kind. It’s relevant, original, globally thinking, and it’s simply Appalachian.
Jeffery Keith: A model of the kind of Appalachian history the world needs now, Luke Manget's Ginseng Diggers uses seemingly lifeless documents, such as business ledgers, to resurrect a practice and a way of life that, as he points out, is best understood as dynamic. By contextualizing the work of diggers within local, regional, national, and global historical trends, Magnet shows how plant collectors participated in what Anna Tsing calls "salvage capitalism," while he deconstructs mischaracterizations of these important but mostly unsung actors in Appalachian history. By building up a better understanding of how various individuals made use of the commons, Ginseng Diggers illustrates how mountain people played a central role in the development of botanical medicine--a story that extends far beyond the mountains and one that continues to have an impact on contemporary Appalachia.
Dykeman Stokely: Luke Manget puts a new focus on Appalachian and American history through the lens of "commons commodities" (herbs and plants that through customary use belong to the gatherers and not to the landowners). He shows how these herbs, bolstered by early America's Jacksonian democracy and religious individualism, helped revolutionize American medicine. Furthermore, he describes how these "commodities" enabled the formation of supply chains from the gatherers all the way to the metropolis and beyond and permitted the region to survive and contribute to the war efforts in the Civil War and World War I. Manget looks particularly at ginseng whose final destination was China but whose great monetary value helped the gatherers to somewhat overcome the circumscription of the commons by state laws and the physical destruction of the commons set in motion by the coming of the railroad and extractive industries. But ginseng's symbolic value as a symbol of the wilderness was also large, and although the figure of the "sang digger" appeared in the late 19th century popular press in the shadow of the hillbilly stereotype, even in some local color novels these figures, though subordinate to characters representing technological progress, served as a counterbalance to the overcivilized American psyche. This renegotiation of gender (and the varied gender roles over time relating to ginseng as described throughout the book), is supplemented by the author in his epilogue by a renegotiation of class, specifically the labor class, which he feels the economy of "commons commodities" can serve as a model for, believing that the commons can be preserved without being exhausted through self-interest and discounting efficiency as a sole model.
