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Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South

Lili Lai, Judith Farquhar

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Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South

by Lili Lai, Judith Farquhar
Compare to estimated retail price: S$54.42  

The item you've got your eye on is secondhand. You probably already know that, but just in case!

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Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South - Thryft
Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South - Thryft

Mountain healing meets the machinery of modern statehood

This is a compelling read if you enjoy nuanced ethnographies of medicine, culture, and power. Its vivid fieldwork reveals how mountain healers preserve local wisdom while navigating state systems. You’ll gain a grounded perspective on ethnicity, nature, and who gets to define legitimate knowledge.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South

by Lili Lai, Judith Farquhar
Compare to estimated retail price: S$54.42  

The item you've got your eye on is secondhand. You probably already know that, but just in case!

The estimated retail price shown next to any listed item represents the first-hand prices we've seen elsewhere, or the estimated original retail price of a comparable item of the same quality, construction and material offered elsewhere in new condition.

Condition guide

Book Condition Guide

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ISBN: 9780226763651
Authors: Lili Lai, Judith Farquhar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date of Publication: 2021-04-26
Format: Paperback
Related Collections: History, Nature, Science
Related Topics: Anthropology, Asia, Medicine, Nature
Goodreads rating: 3.33
(rated by 3 readers)

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.
 

Mountain healing meets the machinery of modern statehood

This is a compelling read if you enjoy nuanced ethnographies of medicine, culture, and power. Its vivid fieldwork reveals how mountain healers preserve local wisdom while navigating state systems. You’ll gain a grounded perspective on ethnicity, nature, and who gets to define legitimate knowledge.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

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