University of Oxford
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
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Professor Elisabeth Hsu

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Professor Elisabeth Hsu

Professor of Anthropology

Unit Affiliation

Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford 

College Affiliation 

Fellow of Green Templeton College

Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology whose teaching and research contributes to the fields of medical anthropology and ethnobotany, language and text critical studies, the phenomenology of the body and the history of East Asian science.

Contact

Email: elisabeth.hsu@anthro.ox.ac.uk  
Telephone: +44 (0)1865 274681

Bio

In 2001 Elisabeth Hsu joined as University Lecturer in Medical Anthropology to establish the Medical Anthropology MSc and MPhil courses at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She has continued to build and develop these courses during her time at Oxford. She obtained Recognition of Distinction as Reader in Social Anthropology in 2006 and as Professor in Anthropology in 2010.

She is a committed teacher who has supervised and supported many DPhil students. In 2005 she co-founded the ongoing Berghahn book series on "Epistemologies of Healing". This series works to increase the reach of doctoral-research-based monographs. She also co-established the ongoing Anthropology Research Group at Oxford on Eastern Medicines and Religions or Argo-EMR, for post-doctoral researchers interested in medical anthropological approaches to scholarly medical traditions.

Throughout here career she has been, in many ways, a pioneer. She was one of the first academics to do long-term ethnography on Chinese medicine in Africa. She made the first translation, into English, of an ancient text describing pulse diagnosis in medical cases, for which she was was awarded Habilitation a in Sinology from Heidelberg University. She also acted as an interpreter for a group of mountaineers that successfully climbed the highest mountain in China, Shishapangma - an event that was celebrated in the People's Palace, Tiananmen Square. 

Her deeply transdisciplinary approach is founded in her initial undergraduate and Masters study in Natural Sciences (Biology) and Ecology. She went on to study for an MPhil in General Linguistics before her PhD in Social Anthropology, 1987-92, at the University of Cambridge. She learned modern standard Chinese at the Beijing Language Institute in the People's Republic of China in 1978-79.

She brings much of her learning into her life and ecologically refurbished her home, ruined by cement, by consequentially applying lime mortar. 

 

Interests

Elisabeth Hsu is a medical anthropologists who's research centres around linguistic pragmatics and Chinese medical practice.

Her many interests also include ethnobotany, text critical studies, the phenomenology of the body, the transmission of knowledge and practice and the history of East Asian science.

Current areas of activity

Professor Hsu is open to collaboration on these projects.

Slurping soups and breaking breads: Archaeology of culinary technology and it's traces in contemporary medical practices 


In this work Elisabeth Hsu uses ancient pots, and the traces within them, as a starting point to investigate the medical concepts of depletion and repletion in Chinese and western medicine.

Conceptually addressing complex health problems today by thinking through non-deterministic probabilities of aetiologies in the ancient world   

This project is focused on the different sorts of cause in the ancient world and the practical effects of more entangled ways of thinking.

Spotlight

chinese medicine

Chinese Medicine in East Africa:

An Intimacy with Strangers

July 2022 | Berghahn Books

Book cover showing a pencil drawing of an ancient garden with urns

Plants Health and Healing

On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthro

September 2010 | Berghahn Books

Circular grey pattern reminiscent of stones on blue back ground

An introduction to the medical anthropology of care and self-care

March 2025 | Medical Anthropology

Elisabeth Hsu has carried out extensive field work in the People's Republic of China, East Africa and the UK.

Since 1979 she has visited remote areas of Southwest China to research kinship and relatedness.

In the late 1980's she carried out fieldwork in Kunming city, Yunnan province, leading to the The Transmission of Chinese Medicine, 1999.

She has visited Huizhou City three times for her research on tactility in caring practices and technologies of the self.

Her work in East Africa between 2001-08 led to her monograph Chinese Medicine in East Africa: An Intimacy with Strangers, 2022.

From 2013 she has explored the Neolithic gaze based on treks through historic English landscapes.

Her textual translation work includes interpretation of the practical applications of the herbal antimalarial qinghao in Chinese formulae and materia medica. This particularly focused on the fangji and bencao literatures from 168 BCE-191. In collaboration academics from: the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel; Pharmacognosy team in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Bradford; and at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Universities of Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing.

Selected publications