ABSTRACT
Max Weber argued that Christian religions tend to be transformative while their Eastern counterparts are contemplative. Whereas other-worldly callings, he suggested, materialized in the Puritans’ this-worldly commitment to building a cosmos of modern economic order, Daoists are trapped in other-worldly mysticism. Within Weber’s bi-worldly scheme, “Chinese medicine” becomes a way for Daoists to enter this-world through magically “rational” quackery—the very antithesis of both scientific rationalism and capitalist moral economy. This chapter argues that, against Weber’s projection, Daoist aspirations and practices of dynamic oneness are making a comeback in contemporary China, especially through entrepreneurial practices in “classical Chinese medicine” aiming at bringing medicine back to life. Rather than a religious revival or a wholesale rejection of socialism and Marxist materialism, classical Chinese medicine makes novel everyday associations and refigurations of materialism (in its Marxist and other incarnations), science, rationality, and pre-Daoist and Daoist concepts. It transforms these ideas and animates them as critical resources for thinking, doing, and being in the world. This chapter argues for ethnographic sensibilities that also foreground immanence, relationality, and contingency in knowledge- and world-making practices—ethnographic co-imaginaries of ongoing experiments in reinventing classical Chinese medicine.
