Pitt to Host Conference on Asian Medicine

October 29, 2002

PITTSBURGH—Pitt will hold a conference involving internationally recognized scholars on the relationship in Asia between medical systems and the formation of political and community identity, from Nov. 14 to 16 in Room 2M2P Posvar Hall, 230 S. Bouquet St., Oakland.

Presented by the University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center (ASC) in the University Center for International Studies (UCIS), "Asian Medicine: Nationalism, Transnationalism and the Politics of Culture" will offer a series of panel discussions featuring leading scholars in the fields.

"In the past decade, alternative medicine has grown in popularity and has become an important feature of health care all over the world," said Joseph Alter, professor in Pitt's Department of Anthropology and conference coordinator. "Asian medical systems are integral to this growth and development. This conference will present cutting edge research that examines the way in which the historical and cultural development of medical practice in Asia is linked to the politics of nationalism, to transnational communication between different regions and countries within Asia, and to the way in which ideologies and power relations influence medicine."

Some of the experts joining Pitt faculty as participants in the conference follow.

• Christopher Cullen, senior lecturer in the History of Chinese Science and Medicine in the Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also deputy director of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge. He is general editor of the Science and Civilisation in China series (Cambridge University Press), founded by Joseph Needham.

• Martha Ann Selby, associate professor of South Asian studies in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her specialties include Tamil, Sanskrit, and Prakrit poetry and poetics, as well as representations of women and gender dynamics in classical-period texts. Her first book, Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. A recent awardee of research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, she is completing a manuscript titled Sanskrit Gynecologies: The Semiotics of Gender and Femininity in Sanskrit Medical Texts.

• Waltraud Ernst, lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Southampton. She has worked on the history of British psychiatry in India and New Zealand, and on indigenous approaches to health and healing in India and New Zealand. She is the author of Mad Tales from the Raj (Routledge, 1991), and has edited Race, Science and Medicine (Routledge, 1999), and Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity (Routledge, 2002). She also is president of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (IASTAM).

• Susan Brownell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. She is the author of Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and coeditor of Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (University of California Press, 2002). Her most recent research has dealt with cosmetic surgery, fashion models, and images of Chinese gender and national identity in global popular culture.

• S. Irfan Habib is a research scientist at the National Institute for Science, Technology and Development Studies. He is interested in cross-cultural exchanges of scientific knowledge between India and Central Asia, institutionalizing the modern scientific and technological research system in late nineteenth and twentieth century India, and the cultural reception of modern science and the dialogue with other knowledge systems. He has coedited Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (Oxford University Press, 1999).

• Vivienne Lo is a lecturer in the anatomy department of the Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine in London. She conducts research on the history of Chinese medicine, in particular acupuncture and moxibustion. Among her key publications are "Crossing the Inner Pass: An Inner/outer Distinction in Early Chinese Medicine," which appeared in East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine in 2000; and "The Influence of Nurturing Life Culture on Early Chinese Medical Theory" in Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

The conference is open to the public. For more information, including a schedule of events, description of the panels, and biographies of the participants, visit www.ucis.pitt.edu/asianmedicine.

The conference is supported by Pitt's Office of the Provost, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, UCIS, and ASC.

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