ABSTRACT

The People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture (POCA) in North America protests against the exclusionary logics of biomedical hegemony and, along the way, it grants personhood and rights to care where they have previously been denied. In this chapter, the authors show the use of anthropology to explore practice of community acupuncture as social action: Low-cost, frequent acupuncture delivered in communal spaces to people who otherwise lack resources to access all types of healthcare—conventional as well as integrative. With POCA leading the charge, acupuncture in North America is having another (trans)local transformation that, likewise, values “tradition.” The school serves the needs of the POCA co-op and rests on a philosophy of trauma-informed care. It trains students in a community acupuncture business model, as well as in distal point practice, which relies on Traditional Chinese Medicine theory yet emphasizes value (to the client) over depth in auxiliary and private services.