ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mei Zhan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

REVIEWS

“I find Other-Worldly the best of the recent ethnographies of TCM for classroom use. Mei Zhan’s interest in the transnational situation of TCM beautifully depicts this system of medicine as thoroughly untraditional and deeply subject to whims that are neither Chinese nor originating in China. Additionally, as an anthropologist of the United States and of science and medicine, I am particularly interested in the possibilities which Zhan’s book suggests for future research on the transnational conditions of medicine and its many forms. . . . Other-Worldly helps to push discussions in the anthropology of medicine into important directions, and raises questions that demand our attention, as anthropologists and as scholars of medicine in its many forms and its translocal contexts of practice.” - Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Somatosphere

“A precious addition to medical anthropology, China studies, and globalization studies. Highly recommended.” - A. Y. Lee, Choice

“Anyone who thinks about the deeper meanings of China’s multi-layered engagement with the world should read this book, if only to grapple with the larger questions of what is knowledge and what the world may look like, as Chinese norms cross porous borders, both real and imagined.” - James Flowers, The China Journal

“This is a book that rewards the critical and thoughtful engagement of its reader. It is worth your time and that of your graduate students.”
- Carla Nappi, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Other-Worldly deconstructs some of the most foundational dualisms in a number of fields. . . . Other-Worldly offers deep insights into the intimacies and techniques through which global connections are imagined and forged.” - Timothy Choy, American Ethnologist

“Other-Worldly is accomplished, theoretically rich, and a pleasure to read. The inclusion of both San Francisco and Shanghai, the use of anthropological and feminist studies of science, and the focus on Chinese medicine ‘in action’ are particularly significant. Moreover, Mei Zhan achieves a marvelous balance between astute observation, her own experience, and the relational dimensions that emerge out of that experience.”—Linda L. Barnes, author of Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1948

“Other-Worldly is brilliant. It is a strong intervention into fields including China studies, medical anthropology, science studies, and studies of globalization. At the cutting edge of social theory, this theoretically dazzling ethnography argues that worlding is an ongoing process of encounters and displacements and translocality is a defining feature of traditional Chinese medicine rather than ancillary to it. Other-Worldly transposes questions of authenticity onto historically specific imaginations of the world and Chinese medicine’s place in it.”—Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

“Other-Worldly deconstructs some of the most foundational dualisms in a number of fields. . . . Other-Worldly offers deep insights into the intimacies and techniques through which global connections are imagined and forged.”

-- Timothy Choy American Ethnologist

“A precious addition to medical anthropology, China studies, and globalization studies. Highly recommended.”

-- A. Y. Lee Choice

“Anyone who thinks about the deeper meanings of China’s multi-layered engagement with the world should read this book, if only to grapple with the larger questions of what is knowledge and what the world may look like, as Chinese norms cross porous borders, both real and imagined.”

-- James Flowers The China Journal

“I find Other-Worldly the best of the recent ethnographies of TCM for classroom use. Mei Zhan’s interest in the transnational situation of TCM beautifully depicts this system of medicine as thoroughly untraditional and deeply subject to whims that are neither Chinese nor originating in China. Additionally, as an anthropologist of the United States and of science and medicine, I am particularly interested in the possibilities which Zhan’s book suggests for future research on the transnational conditions of medicine and its many forms. . . . Other-Worldly helps to push discussions in the anthropology of medicine into important directions, and raises questions that demand our attention, as anthropologists and as scholars of medicine in its many forms and its translocal contexts of practice.”

-- Matthew Wolf-Meyer Somatosphere

“This is a book that rewards the critical and thoughtful engagement of its reader. It is worth your time and that of your graduate students.”

-- Carla Nappi Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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