economy of potency

nationality

Chinese

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

university professor

Princeton University

innovator in the field of

East Asian studies

anthropology

is a medical practice of switching between (and thus harnessing both) western modern sexual medicine like viagra (for desire) and chinese traditional medicine (for the 'cultivation of life').

The synthesis is, however, strikingly apparent from the point of view of patients. Everett Yuehong Zhang illustrates this when he shows how, among the Chinese men he studied, many deliberately switch back and forth between Chinese medicine and Viagra for problems of sexual dysfunction. Such switching comprises much more than simply a choice of medication... rather, differing types of what Zhang calls 'an economy of potency' and an ethics of sexuality are involved one involving 'desire' and the other a traditional 'cultivation of life' both of which objectives these men hope to achieve.50 Zhang demonstrates hybridization in the thinking of patients and practitioners between what is associated with tradition on the one hand and with modernity on the other' (65) : In Lock, Margaret and Nguyen, Vinh-Kim (2010). An Anthropology of Biomedicine

Everett Zhang

Authors(0)

Everett ZhangThinkers

Everett Zhang