Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China's Mountain South

In the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation's registered minorities to "salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate" folk medical knowledges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of traditional Chinese medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of knowledge development while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of southern China.

Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority nationality groups in China's southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local healing systems codified. Gathering Medicines shares their intimate view of how people understand ethnicity, locality, the body, and nature. This ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China is a testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, one that theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the popular authority of the wild.

Author: Judith Farquhar, Lili Lai
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 04/26/2021
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.62d
ISBN13: 9780226763651
ISBN10: 022676365X
BISAC Categories:
- Medical | General
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- History | Asia | China

About the Author
Judith Farquhar is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several books, including A Way of Life: Things, Thought, and Action in Chinese Medicine and Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. Lili Lai is associate professor of anthropology at the School of Health Humanities, Peking University. She is the author of Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China: The Uncanny New Village