Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine Through Transnational Frames

Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine Through Transnational Frames

Zhan, Mei

Paperback

Medical Reference

ISBN10: 0822343843
ISBN13: 9780822343844
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Nov 9 2009
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
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 neighborhood 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 reveals 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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