Holism and Discipline in Zhineng Qigong
Chee-Han Lim, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University
There are thousands of schools of qigong practiced in the world today, but anthropological research has been conducted on this traditional Chinese art. Zhineng Qigong (intelligence-capability qigong) is one of the newest “scientific” schools of qigong spawned from the “Qigong Fever” that enveloped mainland China in the late 1900s. For the past three decades, anthropologists and sociologists alike have turned towards the human body as an analytical category, arguing reflexively, against the smuggling of Cartesian dualisms into ethnographies of ‘non-western’ practices. I propose, within this new social scientific approach towards embodied culture, a non-romanticized look at the holistic approaches of ethno-therapeutic systems. Building on my participant observation of Zhineng Qigong practices in Singapore, I argue that the creative, selective reading of Chinese philosophy and Science had produced a form of cosmology for Zhineng Qigong teachers, that precisely because of its holism, with the Singapore state’s attempts at cultivating a disciplined population.
