Behold the Power of Qi : The Importance of Qi in the Discourse of Acupuncture

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has recently gained a great deal of popular and scholarly attention. However, little work in this area has examined how people actually talk about TCM as a health care system and its implicit assumptions about health, illness, and treatment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an acupuncture community, I describe a Qi-based speech code examining the importance and necessity of Qi (most simply translated as energy) in acupuncture discourse. Proper descriptions of acupuncture require explicit mention and acknowledgment of Qi as well as a grounding in its philosophy and explanatory system. Practitioners are taught to feel Qi and use this phrase as a discursive marker of expertise. Finally, Qi is also used in the competing rhetorics of Chinese and Japanese acupuncture. This study has important implications for understanding the culturally situated nature of health and illness in the United States and the consequences of these particular constructions as elucidated through close examination of conversations between practitioners.

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