Transmission of Knowledge Between Tradition and Modernity: Teaching Chinese Medicine to International Students

Chinese medicine is now a global phenomenon. Since it is spread internationally, questions about how Chinese medicine can maintain its integrity and cultural authenticity arose, especially in its encounter with biomedicine. This way of thinking contributes to the reification of Chinese medicine, viewed as traditional knowledge that comes from an ancient and distant past, passively transformed and standardized in the encounter with modernity. The aim of this paper is to show that the transformation of Chinese medicine is the result of a concrete process that involves well defined actors and places. This case study, indeed, involves teachers and students in universities classrooms. Attending a course for international student at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, I took part in the learning process, analysing the transmission of Chinese medicine to international students, observing how teachers organize lessons and evaluating the impact of these methods on the healing knowledge itself. The way in which knowledge is transmitted play a role in the development and the making of medical knowledge, as it is transmitted by comparing Chinese medicine with biomedicine and using metaphors or analogies, not only taken from classical medical theories, but also inventing new examples related to the experience of the international students. Throwing light on the ways in which this healing knowledge is transmitted in an institutional context, I try to move beyond the modernity and tradition dichotomy. In fact, during these lessons, the transition between the knowledge derived from the classical texts of Chinese medicine, biomedicine and knowledge drawn from practical experience is very fluid and has no clear boundaries.