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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 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
List of Illustrations
A Note on Transcription
Part I:Moving through the Practico-Sensory Realm of Space
Chapter 1. Spatial Textures of the Clinical Encounter
Chapter 2. Misunderstandings, and the Spaces They Create
Part II: Emplacement, Emplotment, ‘Empotment’
Chapter 3. Patients, Practitioners, and Their Pots
Chapter 4. The Patients
Chapter 5. The Practitioners
Chapter 6. The Pots: Orientations
Part III: Pots, ‘Pots’ and Pots
Chapter 7. What Is in a ‘Pot’? Industrially-Produced Chinese Formula Medicines
Chapter 8. What Makes a Pot Efficacious? Social Distance, Exotic Techniques and Potencies beyond Them
Chapter 9. ‘The Chinese Antimalarial’ as ‘Pot’ and Pot
Conclusion
Index