Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology: Completed Research

Eastern Medicines and Religions

Traditional Korean medicine between two extremes

Professor Yousang Baik

Today the Korean society contains both extremes of distinctive cultures such as tradition and modernity, religion and science, conservatism and progressivism, east and west, etc. Traditional Korean Medicine (TKM), situated on the borderline, contains both ends of the confronting values, being in the field of practice whose theory is traditional. This project by Professor Yousang Baik, undertaken during a six months sabbatical from Kyunghee University, Seoul, researches how the knowledge and practical skills of Traditional Korean Medicine (TKM) are handed down from person to person, and how social circles of traditional medicine have managed to maintain their identity. The research investigates two issues in particular. One deals with questions such as, whether such processes of person-to-person transmission come from the unique socio-cultural and historical background of the Korean society, and if so, to what extent do they share universality with other traditional medicines. In other words, the general human nature that involves medical treatment and social interactions. The other important issue is to investigate features of TKM that have undergone spontaneous change in order to cope with the changing environment, without specific laws or regulations.

TKM has been assured a high position by the legal system for almost 60 years in Korea. However, systematic control over TKM in the aspects of medical education and clinical trials by the government or other organizations has been quite loose. This fact holds two meanings. On one hand, it means that it is difficult for the Korean biomedical community to support TKM. On the other hand, it demonstrates the deep-rooted commitment of TKM practitioners to maintain individual spontaneity and independence. Throughout history, numerous treatments, theories, and schools of TKM have incessantly appeared, spread, undergone examination and either have been discarded or been received with recognition. This process is still going on today without taking permanent shape. Despite the Japanese Government General’s powerful repression over several thousands of traditional doctors during the colonial period, TKM practitioners still carried out their own medical practice and many people trusted TKM to play an influential role in medical treatment.

With the society of the 21st century where emphasis is on standardization and globalization, TKM seems to be facing its turning point now. Considering the fact that such a point is historically frequently derivative and that the essence of culture lies not in the rapid external changes and development but is embedded in the everyday lives of the people, it suffices to say that to examine the thoughts and actions of Korean medical doctors who are facing vast environmental changes is the key to discovering the characteristics of Korean medical culture, and future anticipation.

Generating Synchronicity: Vitality and Relatedness in Southwest China

Dr Katherine Swancutt and Dr Elisabeth Hsu

This three-year long ESRC project (Oct 2006 - Jan 2010), explores the hypothesis that religio-medical practices have developed sophisticated linguistic devices and bodily techniques for endorsing the therapeutic principle of 'generating synchronicity' between practitioner and patient. Synchronicity arises when practitioner and patient focus on a single event, which breaks down habitual boundaries between them and generates a space for negotiating uncertainty and interpersonal relations. This is thought to create a sense of relatedness between them, which, in turn, is considered to enhance vitality. In order to explore how people generate synchronicity through (1) the use of vague and/or polysemous concepts during the therapeutic encounter and (2) tactility, the researchers Dr Katherine Swancutt and Dr Elisabeth Hsu carried out language-competent ethnographic field research among the Xiaoliangshan Yizu in 2007-08 and, as it was difficult to visit the Eya Naxi then, among the Hanzu in Hsu village, Huizhou, Anhui province, in 2009-10.

The field results have been complemented with an Ethnicity and Identity seminar series on “Blood, Vitality and Relatedness” in Michaelmas Term 2007, a medical anthropology seminar series on 'Vitality-enhancing Body Substances' in Hilary Term 2008 and a workshop on 28-29 January 2010 on 'The Viewpoint of the Technique: Managing Time and Crisis Resolution in Eastern Religions and Medicines'.

Body-metaphors in the Martial Arts

Dr Chee Han Lim

This study, undertaken by Dr Chee Han Lim, Green Templeton Visiting Scholar in Medical Anthropology in Hilary Term 2010, focused on the various body-metaphors that are employed in the military, qigong, and martial traditions. Due to Singapore’s experience as an ex-colony of Britain, its educational, healthcare, and military institutions are built around western scientific worldviews. However, a large population of ethnic Chinese also ensures that traditional arts like qigong and martial arts that employ Chinese cosmological models continue to be practised.

Encapsulated by the body-metaphors are varying assumptions about human ontology and something that resembles ‘energy’. By comparing the relationships between body-metaphors, human ontology, ‘energy’ and their practical implications, I hope to demonstrate that Chinese conceptions used in qigong and martial arts are much more useful than its Cartesian counterparts for making sense of, articulating, and transmitting the critical phenomenological and practical dimensions of body-techniques.

Currently, a project is underway - with participants of the ESRC-funded workshop held in January 2010 on "The Viewpoint of the Technique: Managing Time and Crisis Resolution in Eastern Religions and Medicines" - which discusses training in the martial arts and qigong as practices of enskilment into different environments.

Shamanic Remedies and among the Nuosu (Liangshan Yizu)

Dr Katherine Swancutt

Katherine Swancutt’s fieldwork among the Nuosu in Yunnan Province – who are a Tibeto-Burman group (known in Chinese as the Liangshan Yizu) – was launched within the three-year ESRC project (2006-9) titled ‘Generating Synchronicity: Vitality and Relatedness in Southwest China’. This new fieldwork arose out of Swancutt’s larger comparative initiative for showing how innovative shamanic (or other magical) remedies are regularly sought out across Asia.

Swancutt has carried out fieldwork among the Buryat Mongols of Northeast Mongolia and China since 1999, producing two articles in the JRAI (2006 and 2008) and a monograph on divination, fortune (khiimor’), and the recurrent production of shamanic innovations (in press, Berghahn). Her monograph shows that Buryats frequently introduce tailor-made shamanic remedies to immediately resolve problems, which their conventional remedies only gradually deflect. Similarly, her article in Inner Asia (2007) has shown that Buryat innovation-making has its counterpart in the ad hoc pedagogy of Mongolian games, which she researched among the Deed Mongols of Qinghai, China.

Launching her new fieldwork among the Nuosu in 2007, Swancutt travelled to remote a forested mountain village, located 8,000 kilometres southwest of her Mongolian field sites. Uncovering unique ethnography about the Nuosu human soul and shamanic dreams, she shows that these are pivotal to the ‘predatory sociality’ of the Nuosu (who held slaves and serfs until 1956-7, when the Chinese disbanded these practices under the Democratic Reforms). Her new monograph on the Nuosu, plus several new articles and a book chapter (see below), offer in-depth case studies which show that – like Buryat shamans – Nuosu text-reading shamans (bimo) produce innovative remedies in moments of crisis. Nuosu exegeses are thus often ‘oral’ and improvisational, drawing upon inspirations from dreams, divinations and astrological predictions – which is the focus of Swancutt’s work on a new AHRC-ESRC research project at ISCA (starting in 2009), titled ‘Icons and Innovation in Southwest China’s Religious Texts’.

The Medical Efficacy of Tibetan Household Rituals

Dr Patrizia Bassini

In this project, Dr Patrizia Bassini investigated household rituals and people’s body techniques to protect themselves against illness. Tibetans are strongly concerned with the harmful influence of “cold” (‘khyags), which in popular Tibetan medicine is seen as the cause of many illnesses (e.g. TB, gastric disorders, postpartum infections).

People make great efforts to keep their bodies warm by eating specific foods (e.g. yak meat, fat soups, rtsam pa, ‘bra go dmar po-dates) that have a heating effect on the body. Additionally, they undergo daily rituals to appease deities in the natural environment and allay the detrimental effects they impose on people. Frequently, people inadvertently anger deities, evoking illness and misfortune from the sacred landscape they inhabit. Contrary to studies that focus on institutionalised forms of Tibetan medicine, this study explores day-to-day practices such as rituals, warmth-maintaining body techniques (e.g. eating and sleeping habits, visits to local hot springs) and how those express and shape the social life of households. To date, Dr Bassini has carried out long-term field-work (several years) among Tibetans in rural Qinghai with specific focus on home-based popular experiences of health and illness.

Sensory Experience and Chinese Medicine

Dr Elisabeth Hsu

This four-year project (2003-07), funded by the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, was one in a series of others instigated by Dr Yu Shuenn-der, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, which brought anthropologists and historians of medicine together in monthly seminars and a yearly workshop, to which Dr Elisabeth Hsu was invited as foreign expert. The themes explored included, among others, “the training of the senses” or “the senses in everyday life”. They concerned in fact not the senses but what in Chinese is called shentigan (literally: bodily resonances), a concept that makes evident how culture-specific the Western notion of “the senses” is and how often it is intricately related to Cartesian ideas about the body. Within the Taiwanese research groups on shentigan, the term was used in the sense of sensory experiences, emotional states, priopriocetive perceptions, hunger, fatigue, anxiety, and the like. The edited volume in Chinese, called Engaging Things: Researches on Things and Experiences of the Body, was published in December 2008.

The Sensory Experience of Thai Massage: Commercialisation, Globalisation and Tactility

Dr Junko Iida

Based on fieldwork since 1997 at a traditional therapies clinic in Chiang Mai, the largest city in northern Thailand, Dr Junko Iida, who was Kawasaki Green College Academic Exchange Scholars in 2006-07, explored how the sensory experience of Thai massage was affected by its commercialisation and globalisation. Now that Thai massage is popular among foreign tourists and the Thai urban middle class, tactile interactions often occur between people with different social and cultural backgrounds.   Most Thai clients receive Thai massage as a therapy for pain which they interpret in terms of folk anatomy. In contrast, the majority of tourists receive it for relaxation or an ‘exotic experience’. Tourists prefer gentle massage, whereas Thai clients prefer relatively strong massage, saying that they do not feel the massage is effective if it is not painful at all. To answer the requests of various clients, practitioners learn massage skills in a standardised course and through ‘hands-on’, intersubjective experiences with clients and colleagues. This study, which is now published in the edited volume "Everyday Life in Asia: Social Perspectives on the Senses" (2010) reveals that it is necessary to acquire bodily knowledge to experience touch as efficacious or pleasurable.