Medicine within Society, Society within Medicine : An Anthropological Exploration of Korean Medicine in South Korea and Traditional Chinese Medicine in China

사회 속의 의료, 의료 속의 사회 : 한국의 한의학과 중국의 중의학에 대한 의료인류학적 고찰

  • Kim, Tae-Woo (Dept. of Anthropology, Chon-Nam National University) ;
  • Han, Chang-Ho (Dept. of Internal Medicine, College of Korean Medicine, Dong-Guk University)
  • 김태우 (전남대학교 인류학과) ;
  • 한창호 (동국대학교 한의과대학 내과)
  • Published : 2012.06.30

Abstract

Objectives : One of the fundamental premises of medical anthropology is the interconnectedness of medicine and society. Recent ethnographies of medicine demonstrate that the interconnectedness of the social and the medical not just evokes relatedness of the two parties, but also emphasizes the agency of the constituents, mutually shaping and being shaped. Against this backdrop, this study attempts to anthropologically investigate Korean medicine in South Korea and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in China. Methods : The findings are based on anthropological studies of East Asian medicine employing long-term fieldwork about Korean Medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Results : TCM is characterized by standardization, hospitalization, and scientization, by which simplification, collectivization, and biomedicalization prevail in contemporary traditional medicine in China. In contrast, Korean medicine is characterized by diversity, care delivery by individual private clinics, and a considerable distance from biomedicine. To understand the divergence of the two East Asian medicines, one should consider the social contexts intervening into the medical contents, such as the role of the state and dominant discourses in given historical periods. Conclusions : Korean medicine in South Korea and TCM in China demonstrate well the hybridity of the social and the medical, suggesting that, for more comprehensive understanding of the medical, the social should be paid attention to.

Keywords

References

  1. Evans-Pritchard EE. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1937, p. 63-83.
  2. Levi-Strauss C. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books; 1963.
  3. Hsu E. The Transmission of Chinese Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1999.
  4. Foucault M. The Birth of the Clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. New York: Vintage Books; 1994.
  5. Malinowski B. Magic, Science and Religion. In: Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books; 1925(1954).
  6. Turner VW. An Ndembu doctor in practice. In: Magic, Faith, and Healing: Studies in Primitive Psychiatry Today. London: The Free Press of Glencoe (Collier-Macmillan): 1964, p. 230-63.
  7. Adams V. Particularizing modernity: Tibetan medical theorizing of women's health in Lhasa, Tibet. In: Connor L, Samuel G. editors. Healing powers and modernity: Traditional medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey; 2001, p. 222-46.
  8. Alter JS. editor. Asian Medicine and Globalization. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; 2005.
  9. Farquhar J. Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; 1994, p. 260.
  10. Janes CR. The Transformations of Tibetan medicine. Med Anthropol Q 1995;9(1):6-39. https://doi.org/10.1525/maq.1995.9.1.02a00020
  11. Karchmer EI. Orientalizing the Body: Postcolonial transformation in Chinese medicine. [dissertation]. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina; 2004.
  12. Kim T. Medicine without the medical gaze: Theory, practice and phenomenology in Korean medicine. [dissertation]. Buffalo: State University of New York; 2011.
  13. Kleinman A. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1980.
  14. Lock M. East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press; 1980.
  15. Scheid V. Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2002.
  16. Shao J. "Hospitalizing" Traditional Chinese Medicine: Identity, Knowledge, and Reification. University of Chicago; 1999..
  17. Wang J, Farquhar J. 'Knowing the Why but not the How': A Dilemma in Contemporary Chinese Medicine. Asian Medicine 2009;5(1) :57-79. https://doi.org/10.1163/157342109X568946
  18. Zhan M. Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; 2009.
  19. Zhang Y. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. Albany: State University of New York Press; 2007.
  20. Barnes LL. American acupuncture and efficacy: meanings and their points of insertion. Med Anthropol Q 2005;19(3):239-66. https://doi.org/10.1525/maq.2005.19.3.239
  21. Hsu E. Chinese propriety medicines: an "alternative modernity?" The case of the anti-malarial substance artemisinin in East Africa. Med Anthropol 2009;28(2):111-40. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740902848303
  22. Langwick S. From non-aligned medicines to market-based herbals: China's relationship to the shifting politics of traditional medicine in Tanzania. Med Anthropol 2010;29(1):15-43. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740903517378
  23. Adams V. Establishing Proof: Translating Science and the State in Tibetan Medicine. In Nichter M., Lock M. editors. New Horizons in Medical Anthropology: Essays in Honour of Charles Leslie, London: Routledge; 2002, p. 200-20.
  24. Kim J. Alternative Medicine's Encounter with Laboratory Science: The Scientific Construction of Korean Medicine in a Global Age. Soc Stud Sci 2007;37:855-80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312707076600
  25. Ma EJ. Medicine in the Making in Post-Colonial Korea (1948-2006). [dissertation]. New York: Cornell University; 2008.
  26. Cho HJ. Traditional medicine, professional monopoly and structural interests: a Korean case. Soc Sci Med 2000;50(1):123-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(99)00284-1
  27. Cho BH. The politics of herbal drugs in Korea. Soc Sci Med 2000;51(4):505-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(99)00492-X
  28. Kim J. Hybrid Modernity: The Scientific Construction of Korean Medicine in a Global Age. [dissertation]. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois; 2005.
  29. 박경용. 한국 전통의료의 민속지 I: 원로 한약업사의 삶과 약업 생활문화. 서울: 경인문화사; 2009.
  30. Farquhar J. Market Magic: Getting Rich and Getting Personal in Medicine after Mao. Amercian Ethnologist 1996;23(2):239-57. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1996.23.2.02a00040
  31. Jia H. Chinese Medicine in Post-Mao China: Standardization and the Context of Modern Science. [dissertation]. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina; 1997.
  32. Ots T. The angry liver, the anxious heart and the melancholy spleen. The phenomenology of perceptions in Chinese culture. Cult Med Psychiatry 1990;14(1):21-58. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00046703
  33. Scheid V. Traditional Chinese medicine-What are we investigating? The case of menopause. Complement Ther Med 2007;15(1):54-68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2005.12.002
  34. White SD. Deciphering "integrated Chinese and Western medicine" in the rural Lijiang basin: state policy and local practice(s) in socialist China. Soc Sci Med 1999;49:1333-47. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(99)00176-8
  35. Taylor K. Divergent Interests and Cultivated Misunderstandings: The Influence of the West on Modern Chinese medicine. Soc Hist Med 2004;17(1):93-111. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/17.1.93
  36. Taylor K. Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-63: A Medicine of Revolution. London & New York: Routledge Curzon (Taylor & Francis Group); 2005.
  37. Unschuld PU. What Is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approches Healing. 홍세영(역), 의학이란 무엇인가: 동서양 치유의 역사. 서울: 궁리; 2010.
  38. 陳大舜 曾勇 黃政德. 中醫各家學說 맹웅재 외 (역) 各家學說 서울: 대성의학사; 2001.
  39. 대한민국 보건복지부 임채민. 보건복지통계연보 제 57호. 서울: 계문사; 2011.
  40. http://www.hira.or.kr/dummy.do?pgmid=HIRAA 020045030000&cmsurl=/cms/information/05/03 /03/1211494_13609.html
  41. Foucault M. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books; 1990.