Description:
- Examines the way American teachers and students of Chinese medicine search for resonance in translated texts and concepts.
- Traces the translation from text to practice and considers the social, political, historical, moral, and personal dimensions involved in the transnational production of knowledge about health, illness, and the body.
- Integrating theoretical perspectives with carefully grounded ethnographic analyses of everyday interaction and experience.
Brief description:
Sonya Pritzker is an anthropologist in the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research, at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. She is a researcher at the UCLA Center for East West Medicine and research advisor in the doctoral program at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in San Diego.
Review Quotes:
"This book contributes significantly to our understanding of contemporary Chinese medicine by identifying and evaluating the complexity of the transmission of translated medical knowledge...For scholars interested in postcolonial and racial dynamics within the social and institutional structures of Chinese medicine in the United States, this book is an excellent qualitative resource that can serve as a starting point for further investigations." - Asian Medicine
"Pritzker's work makes a critical contribution to an otherwise largely unexamined phenomenon: the embodied, personal, social, and cultural nature of translation. The transmission of a tradition from one complex cultural environment into another engages the deep-and not always congruent-commitments of many different parties. Pritzker deftly integrates insights from key theories and disciplines to illuminate the many experiential and moral layers involved in the translation of concepts and texts from Chinese medicine." - Linda L. Barnes, Boston University