Medialab

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the history and practice of traditional Chinese medicine in modern China, and on cultures of health and embodiment in both rural and urban China. She is the author of Knowing Practice: The clinical encounter of Chinese medicine (1994), a study of the logic of practice in Chinese medicine; Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (2002), an ethnography of popular health culture in China’s 1980s; Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (2012), a study of wellness practices and city life in Beijing, co-authored with Qicheng Zhang; and a short philosophical book from Yale University Press: A Way of Life: Things, thought and action in Chinese medicine (2020). Her most recent book results from field research on the traditional medicines of minority nationalities in southern and southwestern China: Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South (University of Chicago Press, 2021). She served as the faculty director of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing for more than three years.