Book review on Mei Zhan's Other‐Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009published_or_final_versio

Leung, AKC

Isis

HKU Scholars Hub

Title Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through TransnationalFrames by Mei Zhan (Book Review)Author(s) Leung, AKCCitation Isis, 2012, v. 103 n. 1, p. 215-216Issued Date 2012URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/160751Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong LicenseMei Zhan. Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames.Other‐Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames by Mei ZhanReview by: Angela Ki Che LeungIsis, Vol. 103, No. 1 (March 2012), pp. 215-216Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666453 .Accessed: 12/05/2013 22:32Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 147.8.230.24 on Sun, 12 May 2013 22:32:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionswork on the craniometry of Samuel GeorgeMorton stirred sufficient interest to warrant anarticle in the New York Times and a significantamount of heated exchange on the Web. In 2009David Prindle (a professor of government at theUniversity of Texas, Austin) published the con-tentious if not particularly well informed Ste-phen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution(Prometheus) (see David Sepkoski’s review inIsis, 2010, 101:455–456). And, of course, therehave been many other treatments. Into this arenanow come the Marxist materialist sociologistsRichard York and Brett Clark. Their very read-able and sympathetic portrait of Gould’s work—both his evolutionary biology and his history ofscience—illuminates Gould’s commitment tothe humanist perspective and presents his mostpersistent overarching themes (the tempo of his-torical change, the structural underpinnings oforder in nature, the contingent character of his-tory, and the multilevel character of natural pro-cesses) in a clear and convincing fashion. Theauthors are explicit that their interest is in “thebroader intellectual issues that underlie Gould’swork, rather than [in] debating any single par-ticular claim about natural history” (p. 12). Un-fortunately, this leads to a rather superficialtreatment of much of Gould’s most significantwork. It also contributes to some shorthandtreatments of Gould’s positions that obfuscaterather than clarify where he stood relative toDarwin’s theory.The book is divided in two parts. The first,“Evolutionary Theory and the History of Life,”concentrates on Gould’s attempts to restructurecontemporary evolutionary theory along morepluralist lines. Interestingly, this is one ofthe points that York and Clark muddle a bit. Theauthors repeatedly mention Gould’s challenge tothe modern synthesis, which is fair enough.What they miss, however, is that for Gould thiswas not a challenge to Darwin’s initially broadand pluralistic approach. Rather, Gould was re-sponding to the influence of reductionism andpopulation genetics on the part of the architectsof the synthesis (particularly Ernst Mayr, T. D.Dobzhansky, and G. G. Simpson). Gould mostoften saw his work as being more consistentwith Darwin’s originally broad formulation ofthe evolutionary process.The second part of the volume, “Science andHumanity,” focuses largely on Gould’s cam-paign against biological determinism. Here theauthors to do a very nice job in outliningGould’s consistent critique of simple biological“explanations” of complex human behaviorsand social norms (most clearly presented in his1981 book The Mismeasure of Man [Norton])and his ongoing critique of sociobiology andevolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, hereagain the authors’ grand scope leads to somerather superficial analysis. Mismeasure was andis controversial (this is the source of Gould’sanalysis of Morton, mentioned in the first para-graph). These may be minor quibbles. Fans ofGould will love The Science and Humanism ofStephen Jay Gould; critics will dismiss it asoverly sympathetic. Readers of Isis who are un-familiar with Gould and the issues in twentieth-century evolutionary biology will benefit fromthis book. For historians of biology it offers anice overview of Gould’s work and his human-istic worldview but limited detail as to theirsources and implications.MARK E. BORRELLOMei Zhan. Other-Worldly: Making ChineseMedicine through Transnational Frames. xiv240 pp., illus., bibl., index. Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 2009. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95(paper).Other-Worldly eloquently shows the elusivenessof the “essence” or “authenticity” of traditionalChinese medicine (TCM), which practitionersand patients in and outside of China try to grap-ple with. In tackling TCM’s globalization,knowledge production, and the politics of dif-ference involved, Mei Zhan convincingly dem-onstrates the fluidity of TCM as a body ofknowledge and a system of practice.Zhan portrays TCM in translocal movements:as it is practiced and taught in Shanghai, the SanFrancisco area, and Africa. She analyzes itsglobalization in three historical periods: in thefirst forty years of the twentieth century, whenChinese medicine encountered new “scientific”biomedicine; in the 1960s and 1970s, when thePeople’s Republic of China exported a scien-tized TCM to the Third World, notably Africa;and after the 1980s, when TCM refocused inEurope and North America as an alternativemedicine for the urban white middle class. Zhanorganizes the discussion of these spatiotempo-ralities in three parts. The first part of the book,which she calls “Entanglements,” focuses on theplace of TCM after the 1980s in northern Cali-fornia, where the practice, now seen as “preven-tive medicine,” became identified with a Cali-fornian middle-class lifestyle. The second pointstressed in this part of the book is the commod-ification of TCM in a global market economy asa medical practice of kindness, highlighting hu-mane doctor–patient relations absent in biomed-ical practice and bringing in new actors andBOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 103 : 1 (2012) 215This content downloaded from 147.8.230.24 on Sun, 12 May 2013 22:32:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionsopportunities. Part 2, entitled “Negotiations,” isabout knowledge production in TCM in terms ofits marginal position in relation to biomedicine,both in Shanghai and in California. Knowledgesare created through negotiations with biomedi-cine, including translations of disease categoriesand body functions. Part 3, called “Disloca-tions,” is about gender relations in TCM knowl-edge transmission and how science, modernity,and tradition are translated through genderedkinship practices. Zhan has built her data onextensive fieldwork in hospitals and clinics ofTCM in Shanghai and the Bay Area in the midto late 1990s.Drawing on the globalization theory of cul-tural anthropologists such as Anna Tsing and onBruno Latour’s philosophy of science, Zhandeals with several key issues in the knowledgeproduction and practice of TCM: the perennialconcern on the part of its promoters, includingthe Chinese State, about its “status” as a “sci-ence,” which continues to affect its uneasy in-teraction with biomedicine; the debate, in dif-ferent sites, over TCM’s “authenticity” asessentially acupuncture or herbal medicine; andthe identity politics involved in the constructionand practice of TCM, such as the representationof its “Chinese-ness” and the changing class,gender, and race of its practitioners and clien-tele, again in different sites. Zhan asks key ques-tions that do not necessarily have standard andready answers—for example, Why is TCMflourishing in California, while its appeal con-tinues to diminish, especially for practitioners,back in Shanghai, where it has actually becomepart of institutionalized medicine?This book is a fine and useful anthropologicalanalysis of the present situation of TCM as prac-ticed in China and California, with very inter-esting details on the changing discourses andpractices of certain specialties—such as waike(external medicine), understood today as some-thing comparable to biomedical surgery. Zhancombines her field observations and textualanalyses with sophistication, and she writes withease and eloquence. The book can be read to-gether with earlier works by Judith Farquhar(Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter ofChinese Medicine [Westview, 1994]) andVolker Scheid (Chinese Medicine in Contempo-rary China: Plurality and Synthesis [Duke,2002]). On the other hand, the discussions of themarginalization of TCM by biomedicine and ofchanging gendered kinship in its practice andknowledge production could be further enrichedwere they considered in more historical depth.Readers will wonder whether the marginaliza-tion of TCM today is significantly different fromwhat took place in the earlier historical moments(1910s and 1920s, 1950s and 1960s) mentionedby the author. The changing gendered relationsin medical lineages, marked especially by theincreasingly assertive role of daughters in prac-tice and knowledge production, should also beanalyzed as a continuing process that was al-ready under way in the late imperial period.This thoughtful book can be recommended toall students of history and anthropology of Chi-nese medicine and will also be enjoyed by non-specialists.ANGELA KI CHE LEUNGf Sociology and Philosophy of ScienceMichel Armatte. La science e´conomiquecomme inge´nierie: Quantification et mode´lisa-tion. 354 pp., bibl., index. Paris: Presses desMines, 2010. €29 (paper).This collection of articles by Michel Armatte isa tribute to the interest and sophistication of newwork on history of economic sciences. Not solong ago, the field was almost uniquely focusedon economic thought and methodology andwork was written mainly for the edification ofeconomists, who meanwhile take an ever-diminishing interest in the past. It has in the pastdecade or two become an engaged and highlycreative area of research. The decisive turn wasfrom a preoccupation with theory, treated as anautonomous domain, to the scrutiny of locationsand practices. Of the latter, the most conspicu-ous for economics are named in Armatte’s sub-title: quantification and modeling. When takenseriously, these lead ineluctably to a wider rangeof sites of knowledge such as government agen-cies, international organizations, think tanks,and financial institutions. Technical economicknowledge no longer appears as a domain offreedom from politics, but as the obverse ofpolitics, subject to relentless processes of adap-tation and forced differentiation.Armatte opens La science e´conomiquecomme inge´nierie with some observations on arecent movement of critique by French graduatestudents of the “autism” of economic science inthe internationalized Anglophone mode. Thecomplaint, to which he ascribes some validity, isthat economics has detached itself from the so-cial world. The theoretical introduction to thefield encountered by students, which also isstrongly impressed on the minds and souls ofprofessional economists, puts great stress on theabstractions of mathematized theory. Yet eco-nomics in practice must be understood as a set216 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 103 : 1 (2012)This content downloaded from 147.8.230.24 on Sun, 12 May 2013 22:32:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames by Mei Zhan (Book Review)

Angela Ki Che Leung

Crossref

Mei Zhan. <i>Other‐Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames</i>. xiv + 240 pp., illus., bibl., index. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/160751/1/Content.pdf

Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames by Mei Zhan (Book Review)

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

HKU Scholars Hub

Crossref