Eating Chinese Medicine

Abstract

Reading medical anthropology could easily convince one that medicine everywhere is a pretty grim and ghoulish business. Healing technologies of all kinds seem invariably to address suffering and death (why else would we bother to study them?), and apparently universal power relation of doctor and patient casts victim of disease as also a victim of social inequality or of structuring cultural models. In this article I take a slightly different tack, departing from an already well-developed anthropology of body to propose that medical practice might at times be a source not just of domination but of empowerment, not just of symptom relief but of significant pleasure. The practice in question is that of traditional Chinese medicine. The pleasures that I explore are those of late 1970s and 1980s in urban China. In wake of Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976, economic reform was well under way, writing of all kinds was exploding into a hyperactive publishing and academic universe, and free markets were bursting with commodities, while every sort of expertise went up for sale. The bitter divisions produced by 25 years of aggressive political campaigns were neither forgotten nor fully remedied, and difficulties of competing in a global capitalist market made future appear as perilous as past had been bitter. A vocal and paternalistic leadership still blared normative propaganda in every medium, and the four modernizations seemed at times to demand as much self-sacrifice