Cosmic Experiments: Remaking Materialism and Daoist Ethic “Outside of the Establishment”

Abstract

In this article, I discuss recent experiments in 'classical' (gudian) Chinese medicine. As the marketization and privatization of health care deepens and enters uncharted territories in China, a cohort of young practitioners and entrepreneurs have begun their quest for the 'primordial spirit' of traditional Chinese medicine by setting up their own businesses where they engage in clinical, pedagogical, and entrepreneurial practices outside of state-run institutions. I argue that these explorations in classical Chinese medicine, which focus on classical texts and Daoist analytics, do not aim to restore spirituality to the scientized and secularized theory of traditional Chinese medicine. Nor are they symptomatic of withdrawals from the modern world. Rather, these 'cosmic experiments' need to be understood in relation to dialectical and historical materialisms as modes of knowledge production and political alliance. In challenging the status of materialist theory and the process of theorization in traditional Chinese medicine and postsocialist life more broadly speaking, advocates of classical Chinese medicine imagine nondialectical materialisms as immanent ways of thinking, doing, and being in the world.

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Nashville Qi? Chinese Medicine in an American Heartland

“…Others proclaimed that they were practicing Classical Chinese medicine, a medicine more attuned to emotions, less mechanical, more spiritual and intuitive—thus echoing trends from California to China identified by Pritzker, Zhan and others. 18 Many others mentioned specific styles almost as “brands” they acquired after attending continuing education seminars or webinars: these included Dr. Zhu’s Scalp Acupuncture, Master Tung Acupuncture, and Dr. Tan’s Balance Method. Some practitioners also employed methods far outside of the realm of Chinese medicine that are specifically branded as trademarks, including Life Fertility Biotherapy, ATP Resonance Biotherapy, and Ozone Reboot Therapy.…”

Landscapes of rizq: Mediating worldly and otherworldly in Lahore's speculative real estate market

“…But as Mei Zhan (2018) argues, Weber's worldly-otherworldly binary rests on a modernist practice of purification (Latour 1993) that posits religion as a distinct ontological, epistemological, and ethical domain and misses the opportunity for a more comprehensive cultural analysis of capitalism. In Weber's framework, otherworldly morality is artificially separated from the secular and material, and religion either prevents the development of modern capitalism or is made to play a secondary role to capital's universal logic (Zhan 2016). As Daromir Rudnyckyj's (2010) study of Islamic revival in Indonesian corporate culture demonstrates, religion is not necessarily a realm of resistance (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000) or refuge (Castells 1997) in the context of economic globalization.…”