? This application is to obtain funding for three years to produce an illustrated scholarly book manuscript on the social history of Chinese healing practices in the United States from 1849 to 2004. This project will build on the Pi's foundational book Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 (Harvard University, 2005); on her scholarship in anthropology and religious studies on contemporary forms of Chinese healing in the U.S.; and on a close-to-completed literature review for the proposed project. Histories of American medicine rarely include medicine traditions introduced by non-Europeans. The history of Chinese medicine and healing practices in the U.S., for example, remains under-studied. This book will provide the first comprehensive study of Chinese healing in the U.S. beginning in 1849, the first year of large-scale Chinese immigration to the U.S. The project is national in scope, with selected local sites providing nuanced pictures of different Chinese healing practices throughout the U.S. The hypothesis is that attitudes and values embodied in theories and practices of healing cast light on societal priorities and positions regarding the body, race, gender, class, illness, and health. Using archival materials, other primary and secondary sources, interviews, and fieldwork data, this historical and anthropological project addresses the following specific aims: 1) to identify key political, economic, and technological developments in China and the U.S. and between the two countries, that influenced how and why particular Chinese healing practices entered the U.S.; 2) to study representative sites throughout the U.S. where specific Chinese healing practices were introduced from 1849 through 2004, together with data related to these practices; 3) to identify key variables in the histories a) of Chinese medicine, other healing practices, and biomedicine in China, and b) of Western biomedicine and vitalism in the U.S. that informed not only the versions of ? Chinese practices entering the U.S., but also how such practices were perceived and received; 4) to ? explicate how changing theories of race affected how Chinese identity was constructed, and how such ? constructions have influenced American perceptions of, and responses to, Chinese healing practices; 5) to draw on scholarship in American religious history to show how changes in religious through, social practice, and pluralism, have contributed to perceptions of, and responses to, Chinese healing practices; 6) to compare and contrast how practices introduced in different U.S. contexts have been adapted and/or acculturated to these settings, by whom, and with what concerns. The importance of the project resides both in its content, and its interdisciplinary methodology. ? ? ?
