Mitra C. Emad, Cultural Studies Program, Department of Sociology/Anthropology, University of Minnesota Duluth, 1123 University Drive, Duluth, MN 55812 (memad@d.umn.edu)
Contracted for publication with SUNY Press in 2008.
Project Overview
In an age of ever-increasing multiculturalism and globalization, this project highlights how the body itself is a place where cultural translation takes root. Through illness narratives of bodily being, new sensations, and emergent cultural meanings and practices, this project recognizes American acupuncture as a fluid, constantly emergent, and contested cultural site. Unlike an ethnography of American acupuncture, this is a project that follows and prioritizes the human body – from practitioners’, observers’, and clients’ perspectives – in and through the cultural site(s) of American acupuncture. Pointing out the needled body and metaphorizing “twirling the needle,” this project offers a theory of cultural translation that is radical and embodied.
Twirling the needle is a technique used by acupuncturists during a treatment to stimulate the movement of Qi (“chee”), or vital energy, through the body. Twirling the needle connects the acupuncturist to her patient on the table, links the person on the table with her body, and opens up the possibilities for a specific experience of embodiment rooted in physical sensation. The needle literally points the way to the body, for both the acupuncturist and the person on the table. The purpose of this book is to take the phenomenon of twirling the needle from acupuncture treatment into the realm of cultural analysis of the human body. American encounters with acupuncture and Chinese medicine entail shifts in bodily meaning-making which I have come to regard as a process of translation – not necessarily lingual translation, but the transformative process of cultural translation – through which new practices, new meanings, and, most importantly, new bodies emerge. My thesis is that the lived human body constitutes a powerful site/source for translating cultural phenomena – the meanings and social practices that make up everyday life. Acupuncture functions as a key “case study” for this thesis; this book examines what meanings and practices are translated in and through the body in the ethnographic context of an emergent American acupuncture.
The book is organized into four core chapters of about 50 pages each, with shorter Introductory and Concluding chapters of about 20 pages; there are also five Interludes interspersed between the chapters, of about three pages each. Total manuscript pages should be around 250 pages. The four core chapters of the book use the acupuncture needle as a metaphor for opening up (twirling) four central areas of cultural translation: cultural imaginaries, the body stories of American acupuncture patients, the practice of acupuncture, and cultural brokerage. Each chapter builds elements of a storied body, with the Concluding chapter returning to the question of how the intractability and waywardness of the human body is reached through embodied cultural translations.
Using a pastiche format, the five sections interspersed between chapters are called “Qi Interludes” and are short, experimental ethnographic pieces intended to play with and elucidate the intractability of the concept of “Qi.” What “Qi” means, how it is used – by acupuncture practitioners, their patients, as well as in the realm of American popular culture – is the subject of the “Qi Interludes.” Juxtaposing text from ethnographic interviews, acupuncture textbooks, and other scholarly and popular sources with images from popular culture, the Qi Interludes offer a playful highlight of issues the reader will encounter more fully in the chapter immediately following each Interlude. The overall purpose is to grant the body its waywardness (through acknowledging the intractability of Qi) and maybe even to celebrate it a bit.
Overall, the human body is the core of this book. The philosophical and theoretical center of this project emerges from the “crisis in representation (Marcus & Fischer 1986) that reverberated throughout the social sciences from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, igniting a shift in cultural studies of the body from the body as an object of analysis to embodiment as a process of perception, the existential ground of culture (see the work of Thomas Csordas). Reaching the body – through ethnographic research and writing about embodiment – calls for methodologies that push us to “situate” our knowledges and our researching selves; so embodiment becomes both the methodology and the subject of a project like this one. Embodiment radicalizes the project of representing human sociocultural experience by bringing us to the root (radical) of human experience – the human body.
Readership
As an interdisciplinary work that emerges from my own training in both medical anthropology and cultural studies, I believe the book has a wide audience, both inside academe as well as in more popular arenas.