Circulating Qi: "Vital Energy" in China and the United States, 1900 to the Present

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

PROJECT SUMARY I am writing a book that traces global circulations of qi over the past one hundred years and explores how this globalized qi manifests in contemporary clinical encounters. My research follows local reworkings of qi as it traveled with Chinese medicine around the world in the twentieth century, from the doctor’s offices of modernizing cities in turn-of-the- century China, through the laboratories of Japanese, Korean, and French researchers, to the expressions of California New Age gurus, and finally to chronic pain and detox clinics positioned in the American heartland today. While these circulations are global, multi- directional, and multi-sited, my two main points of interest are the People’s Republic of China and the United States. As a scholar of Chinese medical history who has lived and worked in China on and off since the mid-1980s, I want to understand how qi has changed in China as the result of debates that have often been arranged around the fraught poles of modern science and ancient heritage. At the same time, as an American raised in Woodstock, New York who has lived for fifteen years in Nashville, Tennessee, I strongly sense that qi has become a part of American culture. This project seeks to trace how this adaptation happened and what it means. Several excellent studies have explored the global circulations and transformations of Chinese medicine. By using qi as a focus, my project offers a compelling way to 1) connect historical processes with contemporary issues; 2) encompass TCM’s meaning through theoretical debates, laboratory experiments, and clinical encounters; and 3) examine how Chinese medicine is experienced by diverse local communities. The resulting monograph, which I will write to be accessible to both academic and non- academic audiences, will illuminate how a transformed ancient concept remains available for patients and practitioners to make sense of their everyday human experiences of suffering and healing. Through historically grounded explorations, the project highlights the tensions non- biomedical modalities face in a biomedically defined world. My study hopes to reveal how a globalized qi, far from being a mere “putative” energy on the fringes of an instrument-defined reality, may instead offer a vehicle through which patients and practitioners forge connections to the world, to their own bodies, and to each other.