Gathering Medicines: Nation And Knowledge In China’s Mountain South

In the early 2000s, the Chinese central government encouraged all of the nation’s registered minorities to salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate folk medical knowledge in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to traditional Chinese medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this moment of knowledge development while introducing the therapeutic traditions of southern China.

Over six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority groups in China’s southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local healing systems were codified. The book shares their intimate view of how people understand ethnicity, locality, the body, and nature. It is an ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China, highlighting the rural wisdom of mountain healers and examining the encounters between formal state knowledge and popular authority of the wild.