ABSTRACT
Most accounts of professionalizing Asian healing systems in America over the twentieth century concentrate on their increasing legitimacy as a form of expert knowledge and therapeutic practice, whether within professional centers of authority such as clinics or politico-legal institutions and the courts. This essay shifts the focus to popular representations of Asian medicine, arguing that an important part of professionalization for any healing group is the relation with its “publics” or the widespread dissemination of its public legitimacy. In this view, popular discourses beyond professional centers of authority-such as everyday knowledge or media images-play a critical role in the legitimization of expert medical knowledge. I focus specifically on the American print mass media, particularly those health and lifestyle magazines that are widely available at newsstands and promote various techniques for improving health in the face of the stressful demands of “modern” living. “Magazine medicine”—Robin Bunton’s evocative term for the broad area spanning expert knowledge on the one hand and lay knowledge on the other-offers a particularly instructive view on the politics of alternative healing.1 As boundaries between expert and lay health discourses become increasingly blurred, especially within alternative medicine, this arena not only highlights new sites of popular health that may have replaced institutional health care practices but also shifts analyses toward the consumption and representation of health rather than its production or practice. What sociologist Peter Conrad calls the “public eye,” defined here as media discourse and images available in the public sphere, thus becomes a crucial site within which professional definitions themselves are modified as well as one that health-seeking individuals use to construct meanings of social phenomena.2
