In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of state-led knowledge development while appreciating local therapeutic practices scattered through rural southern China. The nationalities highlighted are the Achang, Li, Lisu, Qiang, Tujia, Yao, and Zhuang groups. Chapter 1 focuses eth ... More

In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of state-led knowledge development while appreciating local therapeutic practices scattered through rural southern China. The nationalities highlighted are the Achang, Li, Lisu, Qiang, Tujia, Yao, and Zhuang groups. Chapter 1 focuses ethnographically on grass-roots institution-building, and recounts the short but rich history of some relatively successful institutions of nationality medicine. In Chapter 2, medical knowledge sorted into textbooks is shown to result from survey and conceptual work by scholar-activists, and certain openings of formal knowledge to wild expertise and folk authority are noted. Chapter 3 turns to embodiment, reading through textbooks, an explanatory sketch, and the hands-on techniques of local practitioners to discern specific bodies and herbal agents. Herbals are the central topic of Chapter 4, which tracks the love life of humans and plants, and explores other intimacies between human healers and their favored forest products. Chapter 5 dwells on a series of encounters between state agents and nationality healers as well as between official knowledge and earthbound lore, survey researchers and local activists, and anthropologists and their allies and interlocutors. This study draws inspiration from philosophers ranging from Heidegger to Zhuangzi, Deleuze to Mao Zedong, but above all it attends to local knowledge in China’s mountain south.