Description:

LINDA BARNES: Medical Anthropology & Cross-Cultural Practice, Boston University

"Chinese Medicine and Healing: Cases of Pluralism and Legitimacy"

Description: The study of religion and healing draws on interdisciplinary approaches to interpret meanings assigned to illness, affliction, and suffering; healing, health, and well-being; healing systems and traditions, their interactions, and the factors that influence them; and related topics and issues. This talk will explore examples of such intersections through selected Chinese medicine and healing traditions, given that their practices and interpretations reside in settings ranging from temples to clinics and laboratories, and legislative chambers.

**co-sponsored by the Buffett Institute's Global Medical Cultures & Law Research Group

Bio: Linda Barnes is a medical anthropologist and a scholar in the study of world religions. She is a Professor of Family Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), and in the Division of Religious and Theological Studies in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. Her research and teaching interests address the intersections of cultural, religious and therapeutic pluralism, particularly in the United States. She is committed to including an understanding of the healing practices of culturally complex patient populations in the training of researchers and clinicians, and to helping both to better understand how religious worldviews play a part in patient and family understandings of illness and healing. As a historian and medical anthropologist, her research expertise addresses the cultural and social history of Western responses to Chinese healing traditions, in relation to histories of race, medicine, and religion.

 reception to follow