Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames

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.

• Psychiatric Encounters: Madness and Modernity in Yucatan, Mexico (Medical Anthropology)
• And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life
• Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (California Series in Public Anthropology)
• Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)
• Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo
• Righteous Dopefiend (Volume 21) (California Series in Public Anthropology)
• On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South
• AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame
• Europe and the People Without History
• Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl