Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine Through Transnational Frames

Acknowledgments; Preface; Introduction; I. Entanglements; 1. Get on Track with the World; 2. Misplaced Hearts; II. Negotiations; 3. Does It Take a Miracle?; 4. Translating Knowledges; III. Dislocations; 5. Engendering Families and Knowledges, Sideways; 6. Discrepant Distances; Epilogue Notes; References; Index

University of California, Irvine

"Other-Worldly is brilliant. It is a strong intervention into fields including China studies, medical anthropology, science studies, and studies of globalization. At the forefront of social theory, this theoretically dazzling ethnography argues that worlding is an ongoing process of encounters and displacements and that translocality is a defining feature of traditional Chinese medicine rather than ancillary to it, while it 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 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 1848 "Through a series of illuminating encounters, Mei Zhan's Other-Worldly makes a compelling case for why Chinese medicine as we know it today cannot be understood outside of a transnational frame. Zhan's innovative ethnography at once de-ghettoizes Chinese medicine and charts the emerging cultural shape of the new Pacific Century."--Engseng Ho, author of The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean