Gathering Medicines

Download or read book Gathering Medicines written by Judith Farquhar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The central government of China recently called for all of the nation's registered minorities to "salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate" folk medical knowledges in an effort create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of systematization while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of Southern China. Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai went up into the mountains to work with seven minority nationality groups, observing how medicines were gathered and local systems of knowledge codified. A testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, this collaborative ethnography theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the authority of the wild"--