Gathering Medicines - by Judith Farquhar (Paperback)

About the Book

"The central government of China recently called for all of the nation's registered minorities to "salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate" folk medical knowledges in an effort create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of systematization while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of Southern China. Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai went up into the mountains to work with seven minority nationality groups, observing how medicines were gathered and local systems of knowledge codified. A testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, this collaborative ethnography theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the authority of the wild"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Gathering Medicines offers important empirical, conceptual, and methodological insights into what it means to practice and theorize medicine within the geographical borders of the People's Republic of China today."-- "Isis"

"Gathering Medicines offers an immensely valuable and sensitive account of health and medical practices in regions that have rarely been explored in academic literature."-- "Asian Medicine"

"A well-written account of often-charming, sometimes moving encounters with healers diligently trying to record disappearing ways of knowing and curing sickness. Ideal for anyone interested in history and local traditions of medicine in China."-- "Choice Connect"

"Gathering Medicines is an ethnography of epistemology at its best. Unpacking words and things, collecting and feeling plants, the authors thread relentlessly through depth and density to craft their book, a multidimensional object at its core."-- "Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis"

"Experienced anthropologists Farquhar and Lai have written a philosophically sophisticated ethnography of today's China caught in the act of constructing 'minority nationality medicines, ' a set of complex, always changing, social, and epistemological things."-- "Nathan Sivin, University of Pennsylvania"

"In Gathering Medicines, Farquhar and Lai offer a remarkably wide range of observations and reflections on the anthropology and history of medicine as a living social practice in southern China. They weave into their discussion a fascinating array of life histories and object narratives, a rich assortment of institutional sites and both textual and nonliterate practices, and an abundance of self-critical reflections on methodology and meaning. This is a major, pathbreaking piece of scholarship, indicative of the highest-quality research and analysis."-- "David Arnold, University of Warwick"

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