Indigenous Knowledge?: The Politics of Traditional Chinese Medicine

UC Berkeley's Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Judith Farguhar on contemporary Chinese medicine as a weave of local historical constraints, global economic and epistemological pressures, and clinical and pedagogical pragmatics.

Judith Farquhar, Anthropology, University of Chicago
Xin Liu, Anthropology, UC Berkeley, discussant

The classical tradition of medicine in China has been deeply altered by its engagements with Western science and nation-state development over the last 150 years.  This presentation characterizes contemporary Chinese medicine as a weave of local historical constraints, global economic and epistemological pressures, and clinical and pedagogical pragmatics.  When considered in relation to the global movement for the recognition and re-deployment of indigenous knowledges, Chinese medicine's emergence in the late 20th century as an influential -- yet always challenged -- "non-western science" is instructive.  Several case studies of Chinese medical theory and practice under global challenge, reflecting a constitutive politics of scientific knowledge, will be explored.