A Way of Life: Things, Thought, and Action in Chinese Medicine

Abstract

Even amid heated discussion of anthropology’s turn to ontology since 2000, East Asia has remained almost an invisible area of research, having seldom been part of the new mode of theorizing and practicing anthropology. This phenomenon is revealing when we compare anthropological studies of East Asia with those of America and Oceania in which scholars have conducted influential ethnographic studies of the ontological turn, circulating pathbreaking concepts. If ontological anthropology critiques the very discipline’s reliance on a specific metaphysical assumption originating from the modern West, and if East Asia and modern Europe do not share the same metaphysical ground, it is natural to expect scholars to study ontological anthropology of East Asia. Filling the lacuna in the research and, further, articulating the potential of East Asian studies for the discussion of “turn,” in A Way of Life Judith Farquhar, a leading scholar in the studies of East Asian medicine, examines Chinese medical reality and its connectedness to thought and practice. Even though the author does not use the exact wording “ontological turn,” her intention regarding ontological discussion is clear in her critical application in Chapter 1 of John Law’s “One-World World” to Joseph Needham’s Chinese science project that premises “the evolution of world knowledge toward better and better accounts of only one world” (8). Delineating more than one ontological ground with East Asian medicine, A Way of Life speaks of beyond the One-World World and beyond only one way of life. Translation matters, probably the most, in Farquhar’s elaboration of Chinese medicine. Or, to put it another way, translation is an inevitably central issue, since, regarding the text’s ontology-involved translation, it is not just an equivalentword-seeking practice between East Asian and Euro-American languages. Rather, it is an inter-worldly endeavor since “[w]hen we embark on the translation of Chinese medical things, thought, and action... , new and marvelous worlds emerge” (12). Farquhar’s approach, however, faces the “impossibility” of translation, since nothing is fixed—both referents and referrers are moving on plural ontological