Toward Knowing: Engaging Chinese Medical Worlds

Re-exploring recent research on nationality medicines of southwestern China, this talk reports visits to three mountain herbalists, describing the particular ways they practice knowing and use their expertise to treat difficult disorders. In that frictional field of medicine where expertise is not just possession of knowledge, it is also skills, politics, ethics, manipulations, ideologies, and more than one set of ontological assumptions. On the road through a mostly unknowable world, such Chinese healers expect transformations in both those who know and in what can be known and enacted. These lives teach us how to know not through concepts but through the irreducible patterning of life.