Professor Judith Farquhar

Details of Professor Judith Farquhar's Munro lecture.

Institution and Wild Knowledge: Salvaging and Sorting Minority Medicines in China

Event details

Date: Friday 20 June 2014, 6.30pm - 7.30pm

Venue: George Square Lecture Theatre, George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LK

Lecture abstract

Institution is a complex concept that has often stood in for more problematic terms such as “society” and/or “the state.” As anthropologists continue to exploit a heuristic analytic divide between society and culture - seeking, for example, to link a sociological context to the cultural interpretation of texts - we nevertheless worry about freezing, totalizing, and de-historicizing “social structures.” Institutions have seemed a humbler and more empirical thing to investigate, still able to serve as social foundation or frame for cultural and, in this case, epistemological, activity.

In this lecture I turn from institution as a noun denoting a structure to institution as a verb naming a process: Drawing on the work of two differently positioned, and “ethnically” different, healers in southern China, I consider the multi-stranded process of salvaging and sorting Tujia and Zhuang traditional medical systems, in its aspect as institutionalization. Working with a certain amount of government support, while drawing on already long careers of healing in “the wild” beyond official organizations, these doctors create and strategize an institutional existence that sustains and even increases kinds of knowledge and efficacy that reach far beyond “the (human) social.” In their lives, official and wild medicine are organically interwoven, though not without tensions at the government-grassroots interface. These institution processes have methodological lessons for social anthropology.