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Other–Worldly – Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames

Autor Mei Zhan
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 8 noi 2009
Traditional Chinese medicine is often portrayed as an enduring system of therapeutic knowledge that has become globalized in recent decades. In Other-Worldly, Mei Zhan argues that the discourses and practices called “traditional Chinese medicine” are made through, rather than prior to, translocal encounters and entanglements. Zhan spent a decade following practitioners, teachers, and advocates of Chinese medicine through clinics, hospitals, schools, and grassroots organizations in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on that ethnographic research, she demonstrates that the everyday practice of Chinese medicine is about much more than writing herbal prescriptions and inserting acupuncture needles. “Traditional Chinese medicine” is also made and remade through efforts to create a preventive medicine for the “proletariat world,” reinvent it for cosmopolitan middle-class aspirations, produce clinical “miracles,” translate knowledge and authority, and negotiate marketing strategies and medical ethics. Whether discussing the presentation of Chinese medicine at a health fair sponsored by a Silicon Valley corporation, or how the inclusion of a traditional Chinese medicine clinic authenticates the “California” appeal of an upscale residential neighbourhood in Shanghai, Zhan emphasizes that unexpected encounters and interactions are not anomalies in the structure of Chinese medicine. Instead, they are constitutive of its irreducibly complex and open-ended worlds. Zhan proposes an ethnography of “worlding” as an analytic for engaging and illuminating emergent cultural processes such as those she describes. Rather than taking “cultural difference” as the starting point for anthropological inquiries, this analytic emphasizes how various terms of difference—for example, “traditional,” “Chinese,” and “medicine”— are invented, negotiated, and deployed translocally. Other-Worldly is a theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich account of the worlding of Chinese medicine.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780822343844
ISBN-10: 0822343843
Pagini: 256
Ilustrații: 8 illustrations
Dimensiuni: 156 x 237 x 21 mm
Greutate: 0.34 kg
Editura: MD – Duke University Press
Locul publicării:United States

Cuprins

Acknowledgments; Preface ; Introduction; I. Entanglements; 1. Get on Track with the World; 2. Misplaced Hearts; II. Negotiations; 3. Does It Take a Miracle?; 4. Translating Knowledges; III. Dislocations; 5. Engendering Families and Knowledges, Sideways; 6. Discrepant Distances; EpilogueNotes; References; Index

Recenzii

“Other-Worldly is brilliant. It is a strong intervention into fields including China studies, medical anthropology, science studies, and studies of globalization. At the forefront of social theory, this theoretically dazzling ethnography argues that worlding is an ongoing process of encounters and displacements and that translocality is a defining feature of traditional Chinese medicine rather than ancillary to it, while it transposes questions of authenticity onto historically specific imaginations of the world and Chinese medicine’s place in it.”—Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture“Other-Worldly is accomplished, theoretically rich, and a pleasure to read. The inclusion of both San Francisco and Shanghai, the use of anthropological and feminist studies of science, and the focus on Chinese medicine ‘in action’ are particularly significant. Moreover, Mei Zhan achieves a marvelous balance between astute observation, her own experience, and the relational dimensions that emerge out of that experience.”—Linda L. Barnes, author of Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848“Through a series of illuminating encounters, Mei Zhan’s Other-Worldly makes a compelling case for why Chinese medicine as we know it today cannot be understood outside of a transnational frame. Zhan’s innovative ethnography at once de-ghettoizes Chinese medicine and charts the emerging cultural shape of the new Pacific Century.”—Engseng Ho, author of The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean

Textul de pe ultima copertă

""Other-Worldly" is accomplished, theoretically rich, and a pleasure to read. The inclusion of both San Francisco and Shanghai, the use of anthropological and feminist studies of science, and the focus on Chinese medicine 'in action' are particularly significant. Moreover, Mei Zhan achieves a marvelous balance between astute observation, her own experience, and the relational dimensions that emerge out of that experience."--Linda L. Barnes, author of "Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1948"

Descriere

A transnational ethnography of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China and the US