Networking acupuncture in Vietnam

Abstract

This thesis proposes that medical anthropologists change the way we think about acupuncture in Vietnam. Acupuncture should not be conceived as a discrete medicophilosophical system as has been acupuncture’s textual identity in academic writings to date. Acupuncture is rather a performative network, in the sense used by Bruno Latour, constituted through energetic relationships between science, people, textbooks, classrooms, pedagogic practices, clinical technologies and much more. These come into interaction and their collaborations produce acupuncture in unexpected ways. This conclusion was generated through 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with acupuncturists in Ho Chi Minh City and catchments from 2007-08. Fieldwork involved observing acupuncturists engage patients, participating in acupuncture classes and volunteering on acupuncture charity teaching and treating missions. A snowballing method was used to generate connections with a mobile and diverse group of medical specialists. First, it will be shown that in Vietnam, science and tradition were united in the creation of a New Medicine that must be considered on its own terms rather than as a grafting of two different types of medical system. The New Medicine modelled pedagogic and legitimacy-making practices which circulated in the city. Second, local formation of acupuncture objects and shaping of clinical treatment flatten out previously taken for granted hierarchies when describing clinical medical knowledge. The technology of vision was integral to the construction of such knowledge and when interrupted caused acupuncture to grind to a halt. Finally, person networks, after Mark Granovetter, were active in the city generating professional success and legality for practitioners but these will also be analysed using a Latourian approach. Recent ethnographic investigations of science and technology are used to help portray, more faithfully, the interactive dynamic of acupuncture experienced during fieldwork. Such writings extend the scope of what can be investigated as participating in the creation of medical realities in southern Vietnam. I argue that medical knowledge is a reality constructed through continual practices. Knowledge is not a commodity or eternally static entity, knowledge is what we do