Toward knowing: Engaging Chinese medical worlds

Abstract

This discussion opens with a puzzling statement from the analects of Confucius: When you know it you know it, when you don’t know, you don’t know. This is knowledge. Reflecting on various Chinese approaches to zhi (知), knowing/knowledge, in this article we re-explore the terrain we two authors covered together in recent research on minority nationality medical systems of southwestern China. Our itineraries drew us near to ‘folk’ approaches to knowing, evident both in practical medical work and in classic written sources. We found ourselves in that frictional field of medicine where expertise is not just possession of knowledge, it is also skills, politics, ethics, manipulations, ideologies, and more than one set of ontological assumptions. Reminded of some ancient Chinese metaphysical philosophy, we were led by healers to conclude that knowing and good action cannot be separated. The article reports visits to three mountain herbalists, describing the particular ways they practice knowing and use their expertise to treat difficult disorders. On the road through a mostly unknowable world, such Chinese healers expect transformations in both those who know and in what can be known and enacted. These lives teach us how to know not through concepts but through the irreducible patterning of life.