Judith Farquhar

Problems of knowledge in contemporary Chinese medical discourse

This study begins by criticizing the epistemological approach in medical anthropology to non-western medical knowledge and practice, arguing that implicit western dichotomies (especially those of theory and practice, reality and symbol) tend to be inappropriately imposed. It then examines some approaches to knowledge and practice in contemporary Chinese discourse on traditional medicine, focussing particularly on recent use of the term epistemology in Maoist writing and in professional commentaries on medicine. Commonalities between medical uses of yin and yang and Maoist dialectics are explored, and the Maoist concept of essence (benzhi) is found to be important in medicine as well. It appears that though theory and practice are beginning to be drawn apart by some practitioners in the PRC, the classic texts that are still in use and the practical experience of senior Chinese doctors act as important constraints on the development of western style epistemological dualities in medical knowledge.

The Park Pass: Peopling and Civilizing a New Old Beijing

The gates of Beijing’s famous parks open at daybreak. The largest crowds of park visitors stream through them between 5:00 and 8:00 a.m., a bit later in the coldest winter months. Though the gatehouses where admission tickets are collected are usually staffed at these hours, ticket sellers and ticket takers have little to do. Almost everyone going through the gates at these early hours has an annual park pass. In any case, no one bothers to check passes or tickets until later, when Chinese tourists and foreigners start showing up. The large numbers of Beijing residents who arrive at the parks so early are only partly from the surrounding neighborhoods; the earliest runs of buses serving the parks also bring numerous park visitors, some of them from remote suburbs.1 Inside the parks at these hours, all is motion. Walkers, joggers, practitioners of taiji quan (tai chi), dancers, dog walkers, and calisthenics enthusiasts stake out their spaces and fill them to overflowing. Usually the only islands of stillness are small groups of stationary qigong adepts, focused on a more interior dynamic but active nevertheless. Later in the day these spaces will be shared by strollers enjoying the beauties of the park as well as by singing groups, dancing classes, handicraft makers, water calligraphers, kite flyers, amateur opera performers, and photographers using the park as a well-groomed backdrop. Foreign visitors to China’s cities are unfailingly impressed with the particular charm of this form of public life. But the exact nature of this “charm” has proven

Information and Its Practical Other: Crafting Zhuang Nationality Medicine

This article shows how a newly “salvaged” and “sorted” minority nationality medicine is being rendered as information, while attending to the dynamic emergence of new knowledge. After providing some historical background for the ethnic medicines movement and its Chinese character, we introduce Zhuang nationality medicine. First we consult two leading scholars of Zhuang medicine about history and theory, then turn to the informational and practical character of the medical textbooks they have collaboratively published. Turning then to our recent field research in Guangxi with Zhuang medicine experts, we puzzle over several instances of collecting and deploying information about a Zhuang medicine that is still hard to pin down. Contemplating the relatively short history of Zhuang medicine as a system, we ask questions about knowledge: What kinds of “wild” knowledge have been “salvaged” and “sorted” in the informationalizing process? What “traditional” knowledge has been put in the shade, what elements are brought to light, and where are people finding novelty and surprises? Though information narrows and disciplines a healing tradition, reducing and standardizing knowledge into communicable parts and ordered wholes, it also brings an added power to medical work through its publicity and practical dissemination. Asking what new worlds are emerging from modern epistemological disciplines, then, we bear witness to the creative syntheses that are put into play in the lives of healers and patients. We also note the emergence of a valorized wildness and excess inherent to practice, glimpsing in fragments a differently structured other to the formal knowledge or information that would tame healing knowledge for well-regulated use.

Reading Hands: Pulse Qualities and the Specificity of the Clinical

Opening with a contrast between the pulse-reading practices of traditional Chinese medicine doctors in clinics and the objective data on pulses provided by the electronic pulsometer, this discussion analyzes the qualitative judgments involved in medical diagnosis and therapy. Working clinicians who discern and classify pathological processes employ a semiotics of qualities to establish the value, or practical and ethical significance, of bodily signs. The embodied perceptiveness of pulse reading in Chinese medicine is thus understood as an engagement with qualities. As such, it narrows the field of qualities available to the touch in conventional and historically authorized ways, while still relying on a qualitative excess. In spite of a widespread interest in providing objectively proven, evidence-based medicine both in China and in North America, this article suggests that it is in the nature of clinical work everywhere ultimately to prefer a qualitative semiotics that exceeds standardized classification and quantification.

STS, TCM, and Other Shi 勢 (Situated Dispositions of Power/Knowledge)

Reading John Law and Wen-yuan Lin’s “Provincializing STS,” I can only suppose that I am expected to engage with it as a cultural anthropologist who has studied the social life of traditional Chinese medicine in China. Certainly, I am interested in how these authors, both outsiders (like me) to the technicalities of Chinese medicine, have found resources for thinking about the global sciences through experiencing clinical practice in Taiwan. But before engaging with the lives and truths of a non-Western medical system as Law and Lin present it, I want to take up a more fundamental challenge their article presents. The authors argue that we—historians and sociologists of scientific knowledge and practice, writing mostly in English—push beyond the principle of symmetry in the work of science and technology studies. “Symmetry between true knowledge claims and those that were false,” they note, “was crucial to [our earlier colleagues in] the sociology of scientific knowledge” (213). Further, an even-handed extension of agency and efficacy to nonhuman realms has also been important to theory, far beyond STS. Actor-network theory with its distributed agency has led some social thought away from epistemological and cognitive abstractions to encourage a return to history and ethnography. In this turn to the concrete and the particular, the authors display a certain agnosticism about theory and universals. More important, they implicitly historicize a theory-practice or theory-case divide in ourmethodological assumptions. One outcome of amore serious engagement with other rationalities might be a revived vision of hybrid praxis for a hegemonicWestern academy. Thoughwewantmore than just “theory from the South” (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), we still don’t know the contours of the symmetries we seek in a truly postcolonial STS. The universalist imaginary of all sciences, including the human sciences—the “one-world world,” as Law (2015) has called it—has been made to look provincial well before thismoment, especially at the hands of science studies. But Law and Lin in their essay have a polemical point to make against any complacency the field might fall into. They would have our theory relativize even the terms of analysis. There might, in other words, be multiple and incommensurate languages in the analytical

Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine.

Introduction - we take practice to be our guide Chinese medicine as institutional object and historical moment preliminary orientations - sources and manifestations, unity and multiplicity the clinical encounter observed description and analysis in Kanbing the syndrome-therapy pivot remanifesting the syndrome and qualifying classification, specificity, history and action - an overview of the clinical encounter.