Information and Its Practical Other: Crafting Zhuang Nationality Medicine

Abstract

This article shows how a newly “salvaged” and “sorted” minority nationality medicine is being rendered as information, while attending to the dynamic emergence of new knowledge. After providing some historical background for the ethnic medicines movement and its Chinese character, we introduce Zhuang nationality medicine. First we consult two leading scholars of Zhuang medicine about history and theory, then turn to the informational and practical character of the medical textbooks they have collaboratively published. Turning then to our recent field research in Guangxi with Zhuang medicine experts, we puzzle over several instances of collecting and deploying information about a Zhuang medicine that is still hard to pin down. Contemplating the relatively short history of Zhuang medicine as a system, we ask questions about knowledge: What kinds of “wild” knowledge have been “salvaged” and “sorted” in the informationalizing process? What “traditional” knowledge has been put in the shade, what elements are brought to light, and where are people finding novelty and surprises? Though information narrows and disciplines a healing tradition, reducing and standardizing knowledge into communicable parts and ordered wholes, it also brings an added power to medical work through its publicity and practical dissemination. Asking what new worlds are emerging from modern epistemological disciplines, then, we bear witness to the creative syntheses that are put into play in the lives of healers and patients. We also note the emergence of a valorized wildness and excess inherent to practice, glimpsing in fragments a differently structured other to the formal knowledge or information that would tame healing knowledge for well-regulated use.

Keywords:

• Chinese minorities
• folk and ethnic medicines
• systematizing medical knowledge
• Zhuang nationality culture and medicine
• state knowledge production

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and a number of funds at the University of Chicago: the Adolf and Marion Lichtstern Fund for Anthropological Research, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Confucius Institute of the University of Chicago. We are also especially grateful for the collaboration of Luo Jie, Tan Laoxi, and Fang Meijian and the in-kind support of the Guangxi University of Chinese Medicine.

Notes

 1 A special issue of the Guangxi Nationalities Report (Guangxi Minzu Xuebao 广西民族学报) is in preparation, which will include articles authored by our local research collaborators.

 2 In this discussion we use the terms modern and rational, and nonrational, as Isabelle Stengers does in her article “The Doctor and the Charlatan” (2003). Also in this article we conflate the epistemological situations presented by databases, as critically explored by Geoffrey Bowker in Memory Practices in the Sciences (2005), with the structuring of information one finds in medical textbooks in the People's Republic of China. (Also see Bowker and Star 1999.) We owe the concept of coproduction to Rheinberger 2010.

 3 Perhaps it does not quite go without saying that, in a medical history sense, all organized forms of medicine are “ethnomedicine.” Along these lines, the authors were interested to discover in a Nanning bookstore, among many works on Zhuang ethnic culture, a grouping of biomedical textbooks under the label “foreign nationality medicine” (waiguo minzu yixue 外国民族医学).

 4 See Kloos 2013 for a discussion of the notion of “system” in the domain of ethnic (Tibetan) medicines.

 5 Sources of the material in this section are our interviews with Huang Hanru in 2011 and 2012, and his biography by Wang Bocan (2011); and an interview with Huang Jinming in 2012, and his biography by Hu Hui (2011).

 6 “Self-study” (zixue) of Chinese medicine and general health care has been a very widespread practice throughout the history of the People's Republic of China. At times it has been possible for self-trained doctors to take a certification test resulting in authorization to practice as a TCM doctor, an herbalist, or a bonesetter. Some of these have received degrees from correspondence schools. Modern (post-1949) textbooks have thus been designed not only for classroom use in medical schools but also for popular use, in keeping with a Maoist emphasis (now disappearing) on enrolling the general population in the advance of science (Schmalzer 2008).

 7 One hallmark of Zhuang medicine is its emphasis on drawing “poisons” out of the body. This great interest is evident in the longest (by far) section of Part 2. Part 2 is the middle part of the book, devoted to short descriptions of the natural drugs typically used in Zhuang medicine. Chapter 1 on undoing poisons has seven sections, each devoted to drugs that undo a different kind of “poison.” Scholars of Chinese medicine have shown that poison in the history of East Asian medicine is much more than a biological toxin, so “poison” is not a very good translation (Obringer 1995; Hanson 2011; da Col 2012). For Zhuang medicine, textbooks argue that most poisons are environmental, especially associated with southern weather conditions. Types include sha, miasma (zhang), wind, heat, cold, and damp poisons.

 8 The term for “evil” is xie, a word in general use in TCM as well as in Zhuang medicine. One common translation for it, seeking to place it in the rational medical domain, is “heteropathy” (Sivin 1987), which means an external or other disease agent. But dictionaries of ordinary usage still see xie as akin to devils and demons, and the term for “expel evil” in the textbook is glossed in dictionaries as “drive out demons.”

 9 Here we use the notion of boundary object as developed by Marisol de la Cadena (2012) at the conference in Beijing where the articles in this issue of EASTS were presented, drawing on discussions by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989).

10 Tan later explained that he thinks of the patient's back as like a leaf, the veins of which need to be opened and their flow smoothed. This visualization no doubt guides his choice of points to stitch on the back.

11 Again and again in our work with the seven nationality groups, we were told that when many patients seek out a particular healer for care, that fact is taken by everyone to be the truest index of the genuine efficacy of that healer's methods. With this logic, popular healers become authoritative sources for ethnic medical information far beyond their local communities, by way of the salvaging and sorting process.

12 Kathryn Montgomery (2006), among others, has argued that this is a kind of dissatisfaction and insecurity that constitutively inhabits clinic work.

13 The practice of “going into the mountains to collect wild herbs” (shangshan caiyao 上山采药) is widely enjoyed and valorized throughout China. The history and cultural play of this idea and activity are too complicated to address in this article. We defer discussion of them to another time.

14 We hesitate to use words like witchcraft or sorcery in this context, as these English terms seem to overenchant and overmystify processes that are quite unmysterious parts of everyday understanding for many in Guangxi as elsewhere.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Farquhar

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago. Her research on contemporary China spans three decades, focusing on theories and practices of modern traditional Chinese medicine; everyday life and embodiment; popular culture and media; post-Mao and postsocialist micropolitics; and, most recently, national movements to systematize the traditional medicine practices of China's ethnic minorities. She is the author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (1994); Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China (2004); and Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (2012).

Lili Lai

Lili Lai teaches anthropology at the Institute of Medical Humanities of Peking University, China. She is author of “Immanent Sociality: Open-ended Belonging,” published in Theory and Event 16 (2013), and “Everyday Hygiene in Rural Henan,” forthcoming in a special issue of Positions: Asia Critique, which she is guest editing, titled “The Local Intimacies of China's Rural-Urban Divide,” scheduled for publication in 2014. She is also coauthoring another article with Judith Farquhar on their ongoing research, titled “Salvaging and Sorting Out Minority Nationality Medicines in Contemporary China,” in press in Comparative Studies in Society and History.