EQUIVOCATIONS OF THE BODY AND COSMIC ARTS

Abstract

Are techniques of the body always of the body, and in what sense are they techniques? A response to Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China, this essay takes the techniques of traditional Chinese medicine and qi gong as an exemplary case in order to show how some bodies may be more cosmic than physiological and how their corresponding techniques might work not only with but right from the cosmos. To do this, it turns the ontological relativism of anthropology on that discipline’s concepts of the body and body techniques and then takes an initial, experimental step toward a “polyrealist” approach to thinking the existence of unreal things and arts of working with them.

Keywords:

• traditional Chinese medicine
• the ontological turn in anthropology
• philosophy of the social sciences
• the body
• cosmotechnics

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As I transliterate 氣 as qi here, the reader is advised that the word does not mean 器, “utensils,” “instruments,” etc., Hui’s subversive cognate for “technical objects” in the Chinese context.

2 The formulation that humans are almost instruments for totems is Descola’s (292).

3 Farqhaur and Zhang 259–60; Chen 77–106; Kaptchuk 41–74.