During my defence, someone on my examination board asked me an interesting question.
What is an an authentic TCM?
The wonderful thing about the defence is the freedom and space to reexamine and reconsider issues you yourself may not have considered yourself. Answering the examiner’s question led me to put together an important part of my final conclusion.
The question of authenticity in TCM is recurring throughout this thesis. On a practical level, governments (wanted) to legislate and regulate TCM to assure safety and authenticity for public health. On a personal level, TCM users questioned the authenticity and efficacy of the herbal medicines they were purchasing and consuming. An authentic TCM in a greater global, historical context, however, is a more delicate matter and therefore problematic to define. Considering Schechner’s concept of “twice-behaved” behaviour, each reiteration of an act is a novel original; authentic from the first. This begs the question—what was the first “behaved” iteration of traditional Chinese medicine? Perhaps one could credit the 2,000 year old Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon or Huángdì Nèijīng (黃帝內經) as the first authentic record of TCM, but the book itself is based on nearly 4,500 years of practice.
Perhaps Nora would recognize this set of ancient, communal practices on which the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon is based as acceptably authentic milieux. Scholars and TCMPs have termed the practice of TCM in pre-Cultural Revolution in China and preserved elsewhere in post-Cultural Revolution Chinese diasporas “Classic” Chinese medicine. However, this claim would negate the authenticity of translocal reiterations of TCM, which have morphed and adapted to regional environments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Toronto, for example. In the same vein, my participants expressed a belief that TCM preserved in the peripheries is measured as more authentic than TCM in modern China, which has been systematically blended with Western medicine. Nevertheless, such comments disregard the periphery’s own disparate pathways to the westernization of TCM. Thus, this thesis argues that there is a singular ‘authentic’ TCM does not exist, as each iteration of the practice is as validly genuine as the other.
Debates about authenticity have implications for belonging and otherness in cultural identity and the construction of Chineseness. Claims to authenticity have been used by power-wielding entities to position TCM practitioners and users between legitimate and illegitimate, us and them. In early twentieth century China, various governments attempted to regulate practice and practitioners to carve and sculpt the populace into their vision of a modern China. Towards the end of the twentieth century in Ontario, the Ontario government regulated TCM in an effort to gently fit practice and practitioners cohesively into the larger Canadian medical system. Therefore, accepting that authenticity in TCM is amorphous, uneven, and in constant renegotiation, one could also postulate that Chineseness is similarly resistant to clear definition.
This post is Part Three of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
Jenn Leah Ko 