Main description:

Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the 'placebo effect', the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why - apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin - locals would try out their 'alternatively modern' formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.

Contents:

List of Illustrations

A Note on Transcription

Introduction

Part I:Moving through the Practico-Sensory Realm of Space

Chapter 1. Spatial Textures of the Clinical Encounter

Chapter 2. Misunderstandings, and the Spaces They Create

Part II: Emplacement, Emplotment, 'Empotment'

Chapter 3. Patients, Practitioners, and Their Pots

Chapter 4. The Patients

Chapter 5. The Practitioners

Chapter 6. The Pots: Orientations

Part III: Pots, 'Pots' and Pots

Chapter 7. What Is in a 'Pot'? Industrially-Produced Chinese Formula Medicines

Chapter 8. What Makes a Pot Efficacious? Social Distance, Exotic Techniques and Potencies beyond Them

Chapter 9. 'The Chinese Antimalarial' as 'Pot' and Pot

Conclusion

Index