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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on how the practice of acupuncture played out in a set of spirit revelations recorded by a fourth-century gentry family, the Declarations of the Perfected (Zhen’gao 真誥 DZ 1110). I explore how a praxiological approach allows us to better understand how this one practice served to bring together, organize and produce hierarchy between diverse cosmological, intellectual and religious currents of the period.  Condsidered the emblematic tool of classical medicine, in the hands of the family priest, the needle served to pit gods and doctors, destiny and desire, the grave and the heavens against one another. By deftly negotiating these forces, the priest who channeled these texts navigated a way forward for himself and his clientele, while forming the basis of what was to become the highest sect of Daoism for the next six hundred years.

This paper is part of a larger project which investigates how different actors situated medicine and religion between 150 to 600 CE—a time when religious practitioners were at their most active in the religio-medical marketplace. It explores a methodology for thinking about religion and science in China—civilization-defining terms which have shaped much of the last two centuries of cross-cultural comparison and exchange.  Moving beyond outmoded Eurocentric debates about rationality and empiricism, as well as trite claims about social categories being the defining feature of knowledge production, it argues that practice remains an important and largely untapped vein where a great deal of boundary-work was done. Actors thought hard about what they did: what worked or didn’t, and why; how best to do it; how to combine them with others, and the social and soteriological value of doing so. This project thus argues for a disciplinary shift of attention, which brings the history of religion into conversation with Science and Technology Studies and the history of science.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Stanley-Baker is a historian of Chinese Medicine and Religion, with a focus first in the early Imperial period, and secondly in contemporary Taiwan, China and Han diasporic communities. His PhD in history is from University College London, where he studied at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. He has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University, Bloomington, where he studied Daoism and Chinese religions. His BAHons in Philosophy and English Literature is from the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, UK and his clinical diploma in Chinese medicine is from Ruseto College, Boulder, Colorado.  He also received a DiplAC from the National Council of Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. He has held research positions at Academia Sinica, Taipei; the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge; the Centre for Multiple Secularities at the University of Leipzig; and the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing a book on the emergence of medicine and religion as different but closely related fields of practice in early imperial China, provisionally titled Situating Practice: Medicine and Religion in Early Imperial China. He is also co-editing two other books, The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine and Situating Medicine and Religion Across Asia. He is also the project lead on a Digital Humanities project titled Drugs Across Asia. This data-mines the Buddhist, Daoist and medical corpora for data concerning materia medica. This project combines text-marking, statistical analysis, network visualisation and GIS mapping to provide entirely new levels of analysis of pre-modern text corpora, showing the distribution of drug terms across time, space, and textual genre. It is a collaborative venture between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, National Taiwan University and Dharma Drum Institute for Liberal Arts, with contributors from Fu-jen University, Taipei. The primary toolsets are DocuSky and MARKUS.

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