The Other and Self through the Mirror: Exploring Historical Understandings of the Chinese Medical Concept of 气(Qi) through the Western Vision

Abstract

This study explored how 气- (qi), one of the most fundamental tenets in traditional Chinese medical praxis, has been historically annotated into a“hermeneutic situation” at different historical periods. Spirit(s) and qi, the two words that were chosen to represent Chinese 气 in 17th and 20th -21st centuries respectively, were products of cross-cultural encounters, collision and negotiation of a shared otherness across centuries. They are ethnographic narrations that are not only inherently pointed to an alien medical tradition for the West, but also consistently evoked onto-epistemological uneasiness that constituted statements about themselves which needed to be read in a broader historical environment. Borrowed from the legacy of hermeneutics and interpretative anthropology, this project has expounded on the two following dimensions: how spirit(s) became of an allegoric epitome of the ideological expansion of Christian power in 17th century; and how qi served to be a mark for a historical consciousness bought about by institutionalized forces from modernization and science.