Medialab

Lili Lai, Ph.D., is a medical anthropologist. In 2009, she received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently an associate professor in the School of Health Humanities at Peking University. Her research interests include the body, medical practices, and everyday life. Through the lens of cultural anthropology, she examines cutting-edge medical technologies as well as the knowledge systems of traditional medicine (including traditional Chinese medicine and ethnic medicine), offering multiple interpretations and analyses of the basic concepts of medicine, the body, health, knowledge, and practice. She is the author of Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China (Amsterdam University Press, 2016) and Gathering Medicine: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South (Chicago University Press, 2021). She has published more than 30 papers in academic journals around the world.