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.

Introduction -- Moving through the Practico-Sensory Realm of Space -- Spatial Textures of the Clinical Encounter -- Misunderstandings, and the Spaces They Create -- Emplacement, Emplotment, 'Empotment' -- Patients, Practitioners and Their Pots -- The Patients -- The Practitioners -- The Pots: Orientations -- Pots, 'Pots' and Pots -- What Is in a 'Pot'? Industrially-Produced Chinese Formula Medicines -- What Makes a Pot Efficacious? Social Distance, Exotic Techniques and -- Potencies beyond Them -- 'The Chinese Antimalarial' as 'Pot' and Pot -- Conclusion. Kaleidoscopic Refractions.

A leading authority explains the ideas and practice of Chinese medicine from its beginnings in antiquity to today. Paul U. Unschuld describes medicine's close connection with culture and politics throughout Chinese history. He brings together texts, techniques, and worldviews to understand changing Chinese attitudes toward healing and the significance of traditional Chinese medicine in both China and the Western world. Unschuld reveals the emergence of a Chinese medical tradition built around a new understanding of the human being, considering beliefs in the influence of cosmology, numerology, and the supernatural on the health of the living. He describes the variety of therapeutic approaches in Chinese culture, the history of pharmacology and techniques such as acupuncture, and the global exchange of medical knowledge. Insights are offered into the twentieth-century decline of traditional medicine, as military defeats caused reformers and revolutionaries to import medical knowledge as part of the construction of a new China. Unschuld also recounts the reception of traditional Chinese medicine in the West since the 1970s, where it is often considered an alternative to Western medicine at the same time as China seeks to incorporate elements of its medical traditions into a scientific framework. This concise and compelling introduction to medical thought and history suggests that Chinese medicine is also a guide to Chinese civilization.

In covering the subject of Chinese medicine, this book addresses topics such as oracle bones, the treatment of women, fertility and childbirth, nutrition, acupuncture, and Qi as well as examining Chinese medicine as practiced globally in places such as Africa, Australia, Vietnam, Korea, and the United States.

Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called “humoral medical traditions,” as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of “balance” in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to the present, the volume revisits “harmony” and “holism” as main characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances. Balance need not connoteegalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in those bodies?

The English edition of Liu Lihong’s milestone work is a sublime beacon for the profession of Chinese medicine in the 21st century. Classical Chinese Medicine delivers a straightforward critique of the politically motivated “integration” of traditional Chinese wisdom with Western science during the last sixty years, and represents an ardent appeal for the recognition of Chinese medicine as a science in its own right. Professor Liu’s candid presentation has made this book a bestseller in China, treasured not only by medical students and doctors, but by vast numbers of non-professionals who long for a state of health and well-being that is founded in a deeper sense of cultural identity. Oriental medicine education has made great strides in the West since the 1970s, but clear guidelines regarding the “traditional” nature of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) remain undefined. Classical Chinese Medicine not only delineates the educational and clinical problems faced by the profession in both East and West, but transmits concrete and inspiring guidance on how to effectively engage with ancient texts and designs in the postmodern age. Using the example of the Shanghanlun (Treatise on Cold Damage), one of the most important Chinese medicine classics, Liu Lihong develops a compelling roadmap for holistic medical thinking that links the human body to nature and the universe at large.

Traditional Chinese medicine is often portrayed as an enduring system of therapeutic knowledge that has become globalized in recent decades. In Other-Worldly, Mei Zhan argues that the discourses and practices called “traditional Chinese medicine” are made through, rather than prior to, translocal encounters and entanglements. Zhan spent a decade following practitioners, teachers, and advocates of Chinese medicine through clinics, hospitals, schools, and grassroots organizations in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on that ethnographic research, she demonstrates that the everyday practice of Chinese medicine is about much more than writing herbal prescriptions and inserting acupuncture needles. “Traditional Chinese medicine” is also made and remade through efforts to create a preventive medicine for the “proletariat world,” reinvent it for cosmopolitan middle-class aspirations, produce clinical “miracles,” translate knowledge and authority, and negotiate marketing strategies and medical ethics. Whether discussing the presentation of Chinese medicine at a health fair sponsored by a Silicon Valley corporation, or how the inclusion of a traditional Chinese medicine clinic authenticates the “California” appeal of an upscale residential neighborhood in Shanghai, Zhan emphasizes that unexpected encounters and interactions are not anomalies in the structure of Chinese medicine. Instead, they are constitutive of its irreducibly complex and open-ended worlds. Zhan proposes an ethnography of “worlding” as an analytic for engaging and illuminating emergent cultural processes such as those she describes. Rather than taking “cultural difference” as the starting point for anthropological inquiries, this analytic reveals how various terms of difference—for example, “traditional,” “Chinese,” and “medicine”—are invented, negotiated, and deployed translocally. Other-Worldly is a theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich account of the worlding of Chinese medicine.

The geopolitical landscape of contemporary China-Africa relations has provoked wide media interest. After being conspicuously overlooked during the G8's purported 'Year of Africa', the topic generated wider debate in the build-up to the China-Africa Summit in Beijing in 2006. Despite this, China's deepening re-engagement with the African continent has been relatively neglected in academic and development policy circles. In particular, the concrete ways in which different Chinese actors are operating in different parts of Africa, their political dynamics and implications for African development as well as Western views of this phenomenon, have yet be explored in depth."China Returns to Africa" responds to this need by addressing the key issues in contemporary China-Africa relations. Taking its cue from the widely touted 'Chinese Scramble for Africa' and the accompanying claim of a 'new Chinese imperialism', the book moves beyond narrow media-driven concerns to offer one of the first far-ranging surveys of China's return to Africa, examining what this new relationship holds for diplomacy, trade and development.

In parts of Korea and China, moon bears, black but for the crescent-shaped patch of white on their chests, are captured in the wild and brought to "bear farms" where they are imprisoned in squeeze cages, and a steel catheter is inserted into their gall bladders. The dripping bile is collected as a cure for ailments ranging from an upset stomach to skin burns. The bear may live as long as fifteen years in this state. Rhinos are being illegally poached for their horns, as are tigers for their bones, thought to improve virility. Booming economies and growing wealth in parts of Asia are increasing demand for these precious medicinals. Already endangered species are being sacrificed for temporary treatments for nausea and erectile dysfunction. Richard Ellis, one of the world's foremost experts in wildlife extinction, brings his alarm to the pages of Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn, in the hope that through an exposure of this drug trade, something can be done to save the animals most direly threatened. Trade in animal parts for traditional Chinese medicine is a leading cause of species endangerment in Asia, and poaching is increasing at an alarming rate. Most of traditional Chinese medicine relies on herbs and other plants, and is not a cause for concern. Ellis illuminates those aspects of traditional medicine, but as wildlife habitats are shrinking for the hunted large species, the situation is becoming ever more critical. One hundred years ago, there were probably 100,000 tigers in India, South China, Sumatra, Bali, Java, and the Russian Far East. The South Chinese, Caspian, Balinese, and Javan species are extinct. There are now fewer than 5,000 tigers in all of India, and the numbers are dropping fast. There are five species of rhinoceros--three in Asia and two in Africa--and all have been hunted to near extinction so their horns can be ground into powder, not for aphrodisiacs, as commonly thought, but for ailments ranging from arthritis to depression. In 1930, there were 80,000 black rhinos in Africa. Now there are fewer than 2,500. Tigers, bears, and rhinos are not the only animals pursued for the sake of alleviating human ills--the list includes musk deer, sharks, saiga antelope, seahorses, porcupines, monkeys, beavers, and sea lions--but the dwindling numbers of those rare species call us to attention. Ellis tells us what has been done successfully, and contemplates what can and must be done to save these animals or, sadly, our children will witness the extinction of tigers, rhinos, and moon bears in their lifetime.