Main description:

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.

Contents:

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 Institution

Chapter 2 Knowledge

Chapter 3 Bodies

Chapter 4 Plants

Chapter 5 Encounters

Conclusions, and Then Some . . .

Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Emphasis on "Three Ways and Two Roads" in Zhuang Medicine and Pharmacy
Notes
Bibliography
Index