Gathering Medicines

Nation and Knowledge in China's Mountain South

Gathering Medicines
Judith Farquhar, Lili Lai
RRP:
NZ$ 66.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 53.59
Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 304pg
26 Apr 2021 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226763651
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
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.
"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 * "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 *
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
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226763651
Published: 26 Apr 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Spine: 23mm
Pages: 304

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information