Series
Volume 20
Epistemologies of Healing
See Related
Anthropology JournalsEmail Newsletters
Sign up for our email newsletters to get customized updates on new Berghahn publications.
Chinese Medicine in East Africa
An Intimacy with Strangers
Elisabeth Hsu
440 pages, 16 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80073-556-9 $145.00/£107.00 / Hb / Published (July 2022)
eISBN 978-1-80073-557-6 eBook
Reviews
“Elisabeth Hsu expertly weaves ethnography and theory to provide the reader with a lived experience of a journey of Chinese medical practices in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda … Hsu's work is rich with anthropological theory to help make meaning of her findings and, in turn, generously contributes to theory by virtue of the extensive findings and analyses presented.” • Paul I Kadetz, University of Global Health Equity
“This is a wonderful and very compelling book. Content is exhilarating, rich and intense throughout in a highly original fashion.” • Julie Laplante, University of Ottowa
Description
Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why - apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin - locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.
Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford and Fellow of Green Templeton College. She has published widely on medical anthropology, the history of science, technology and medicine in China and other fields.
Subject: Medical Anthropology
Area: Africa
Contents
Download ToC (PDF)