As part of the new Conference series “China in the World”, this conference investigates how worlds of health are continuously assembled, negotiated, and reassembled in China and globally. We approach health and illness not as natural categories and given facts, but as socially constructed and continuously negotiated within society.
Each presenter takes one lens through which they look at how worlds of health are shaped, be it through animals, water, emotions, or violence, or along the tensions between knowledge and ignorance, between the past and the future, or between the inner and outer worlds of a patient.
The conference is structured along three themes: First, health can be defined along different medical paradigms. Binary categories of “modern” and “traditional” health practices, or “Chinese” and “Western” medicine, often overlook how this kind of seemingly static dichotomy was shaped through complex processes of negotiation that both enriched and challenged these categories. While binary categories may appear as separate worlds of health, their making is deeply entangled and codependent.
Second, similar binary categories can underlie medical practices in which the line between “healing” and “hurting” is negotiated. In specific historical periods, transgressions in medical practices have revealed how societal norms are negotiated, often in retrospect but also for future practice, when the line between healing and hurting is formalized, crossed, and reformulated.
And finally, the concepts of an inner and outer world can reveal changes that occurred in the construction of health and illness, or the “normal” and “pathological”, in medical theory. This occurs when external environmental factors are weighed against inner factors, or when the inclusion or exclusion of certain factors in a world of health reveals how it was previously shaped, be it when certain emotions are pathologized, or environmental factors are medicalized.
This conference brings together Sinologists and Medical Historians specializing in both premodern and modern periods into conversation to discuss China’s role in how the normal and the pathological are and have been negotiated globally.
Please check our program for more information.
