Self Care East and West: Ecologies of Empotment

Speaker: Professor Elisabeth Hsu, University of Oxford

Elisabeth Hsu has a highly interdisciplinary profile which proved to be an asset in the last twenty-five years when she was heavily involved with building up the medical anthropology programme at the University of Oxford. Alongside biocultural and evolutionary approaches taught at Oxford, she and colleagues developed a distinctively phenomenological approach to the body, bodily practices and movement, sensory skills and techniques; specifically those which in cases of chronic conditions, anxiety, fatigue, etc., bring the body back into the mind or, practically speaking, effect that a patient’s acuity and aliveness is enhanced (rather than dulled down).

By investigating these daily practices of sensory connectedness between self and other, and of caring according to alternative medical, and specifically Chinese medical rationale, alongside common sensical tlc (tender loving care), this presentation will highlight different ways in which social relatedness is formed through caring. Or, in more theoretical jargon, it will demonstrate that caring practices can be seen as forming the core of different ‘ecologies of sociogenesis’.

The paper ends by looking beyond the boundaries of medicalised care, as we will put these ethnographically observed everyday practices of caring for self and other in conversation with findings made in the history of science, archaeology and social/cognitive psychology.

Refreshments will be provided.

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