DPhil Student
St Hugh's College
Thesis: The Depleted Heart: Navigating everyday life through Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China
This project aims to investigate how “the depleted heart”, serving as a holistic image of the mind-body experience of social distress in contemporary China, is perceived, understood and regulated outside the clinical encounter of Chinese medicine (zhongyi 中医). The analytical focus arises from an observation that the depletion in the heart as an emotional and bodily symptom has now been continuously evoked in Chinese people’s daily conversations to capture a prevailing sense of frustration and hopelessness – an ongoing existential crisis within Chinese society. It encapsulates an embodied experience of social distress, emotional pain, and physical fragility confronted by people in a highly competitive society. While a substantial body of anthropological studies have thus far devoted particular attention to the psychological well-being of Chinese people to examine the profound emotional turmoil within their inner world (Huang, 2014; Yang, 2015; Zhang Li, 2020), in this proposed research, I wish to introduce the concept of xu (虚 depletion), which I believe aligns more closely with a perpetuating bodily sensation of fatigue, emptiness and hopelessness that trickles into the everyday life in Chinese society.
In zhongyi theories and practices, the Heart, regarded as the ruler of the whole body that governs cognitive functions and mental activities, becomes disturbed when there is blood depletion and deficiency (Yu, 2009). However, the negative bodily image of depletion is not just regarded as a syndrome that captures the interest of medical intervention but also signifies the symptoms of a society that Chinese philosophy has long sought to address in its governance efforts. Based on a cosmological framework that assumes a correspondence between human body and society, the Heart has long been a crucial locus of regulation and management in Confucian political philosophy. In this research, I wish to focus on the depleted and stagnant Heart, which, bearing rich connotations of the mind-body correlation and socio-political imprints, could also be associated with a form of governmentality during zhongyi clinical encounter. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted in different biosocial spaces of contemporary China, my research seeks to follow and trace the circulation of the depleted body across various medical and social contexts, examining how it is articulated in clinical encounters, illness narratives, public health discourse and everyday conversations, and how it evokes nuanced connotations concerning bodily sensations, social relations, and moral significance.
yeung.suen @ st-hughs.ox.ac.uk
