Aryana Libris

Author : Zhang Yanhua
Title : Transforming emotions with chinese medicine An ethnographic account from contemporary China
Year : 2007

Link download : Zhang_Yanhua_-_Transforming_emotions_with_chinese_medicine.zip

Introduction. This book offers an ethnographic account of emotion-related disorders as they are understood, experienced, and treated in the clinics of Chinese medicine or zhongyi 中医 in contemporary China. Central to this enquiry is a zhongyi category of illness, qingzhi bing 情志病 or qingzhi lei jibing 情志类疾病 (emotion-related disorders),¹ attributable to disordered emotions and treatable with ordinary Chinese medical therapies. What needs to be emphasized from the very beginning is that qingzhi bing is not a direct translation of the Western psychiatric concept of “emotional disorder” or “mental disorder.” Not a strictly defined discrete illness entity in a biomedical sense, the zhongyi construct is used somewhat loosely to include a group of illness patterns, originating from “internal damages attributable to excessive emotions” (qingzhi neishang 情志内 伤) and marked with certain configurations of physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms. While to group disorders predominantly involving emotions and thoughts under the heading of qingzhi is nothing modern,² the meaning of qingzhi disorders encountered in today’s zhongyi clinics reflects ongoing social and political dynamics in contemporary Chinese society and changes in the profession of Chinese medicine itself through decades of the state-sponsored zhongyi modernization under the guidance of science. Biomedical terminology and technology are commonly present in contemporary zhongyi practices, yet the way in which a qingzhi disorder is conceptualized, experienced, diagnosed, and treated remains remarkably “Chinese.” It is not “culturally bound,” but certainly "permeated with culture". ...