University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 Healing At The Borderland Of Medicine And Religion: A Folklore Study Of Health Care In Taiwan Chia-Hui Lu University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Asian Studies Commons, Folklore Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Lu, Chia-Hui, "Healing At The Borderland Of Medicine And Religion: A Folklore Study Of Health Care In Taiwan" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2453. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2453 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2453 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Healing At The Borderland Of Medicine And Religion: A Folklore Study Of Health Care In Taiwan Abstract This study is about popular healing and its relation to culture. It is based on my field esearr ch in Taiwan from 2014 to 2016. In addition to modern medicine and scientific Chinese medicine, my fieldesear r ch focused on the connections between different systems of popular healing and the role of lay people in their own healthcare. The correlations between them are ambiguous, inexplicit, superimposed upon or intermeshed with one another. In Taiwan, health care and the healing process is part of popular culture. I make evident the vital role of lay people, which often has been overlooked. Lay people includes all non- professionals──popular ritual practitioners ignorant of orthodox teaching, local medicinal healers without a national license, and followers who disregard religious doctrines but believe in divine power.