ABSTRACT
This chapter believes that 'participant experience' would modify the power relations between the researcher and the people with whom she works, because a person who wishes to learn a skill from someone else puts herself into a position of a dependent apprentice. In general, Chinese herbal doctors do not take acupuncturists seriously; literati physicians wrote prescriptions while acupuncturists, like masseurs, were viewed as hands-on therapists. Christopher Cullen comments on their lowly status in Late Imperial China: 'Starmaster Liu is a blind man who performs divination, heals sores, and carries out acupuncture and moxibustion. Although Chinese herbal doctors often belittled the activities of acupuncturists, and with them the practitioner-anthropologists who studied the former, some senior acupuncturists in Kunming. However, as detailed elsewhere, basic principles of acupuncture, outlined verbatim in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, are increasingly delegated to the realm of tacit knowledge of the virtuous practitioner by the bedside.
