Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2016 Embodiment in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Discourse: Healing, Silence and the Miracle Cure Kaicheng Zhan Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Zhan, Kaicheng, "Embodiment in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Discourse: Healing, Silence and the Miracle Cure" (2016). Dissertations - ALL. 496. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/496 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Abstract Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a thousand-year old medical practice originated in China, has stepped into the western world with globalization for years. TCM has entered the West with its foreign, distant and “unscientific” concepts despite the fact that medicine globalization is still a contested concept. My thesis aims to understand the embodied concepts of TCM through practitioner-patient interaction as culturally specific constructs. Among many TCM medical and philosophical concepts, I specifically focus on the healing, the silence and the miracle cure and how they are embodied and co-constructed by the practitioner and the patient during acupuncture, herb prescription and tuina massage treatment sessions. Using a discourse analytic approach informed by ethnographic field notes and interviews conducted in 2014 Kunming China, my thesis looks at data of video recordings of acupuncture, pulse reading and tuina massage sessions, through which I define the embodiments of TCM discourse are feelings as healing, interacting silences and the “miracle-minded” (Zhan, 2009) cure.