Preface 1. Introduction 2. Fever 3. Riding the Tiger 4. Qigong Deviation or Psychosis 5. Chinese Psychiatry and the Search for Order 6. Mandate of Science 7. Transnational Qigong 8. Suffering and Healing Glossary
The charismatic form of healing called qigong, which at its core involves meditative breathing exercises, achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Anthropologist Nancy N. Chen examines the cultural context of medicine and healing practices in the PRC, Taiwan, and the United States, and the pages of her book come alive with the narratives of the numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats she interviewed.
Nancy N. Chen is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A medical anthropologist, she also teaches courses on food, ethnographic film, urban anthropology, China, and Asian Americans.
For readers sometimes puzzled by recent mind-body movements in China and responses by central and regional governments, Chen's clear and scholarly presentation will prove most helpful. This book becomes even more important now that the movement and others like it have spread globally, including to Europe, the New World, and the US. Highly recommended. Choice The book's originality lies both in its focus on the medicalization process and psychiatry, and in a theoretically innovative approach based on the medicalization process and psychiatry, and in a theoretically innovative approach based on the concepts of body politics and spaces...Breathing Spaces is incontestably a very valuable contribution to medical anthropology and religious studies in the context of Chinese culture, and to global cultural studies. -- Evelyne Micollier Journal of Chinese Religions
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