Paper short abstract:

Together with ongoing (geo)political, socio-material and economic changes, Chinese medicine (CM) has been enacted in multiple and sometimes conflicting versions in the Czech Republic. Inspired by Mol, we ethnographically follow four different modes and moves of CM and their relations to biomedicine.

Paper long abstract:

Chinese medicine (CM) has been present in Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic since 1950s when it was brought to the country by physicians who had participated in the Korean war. Since then it has been enacted in multiple and sometimes conflicting versions in the changing (geo)political, social-material and economic conditions in the country. Inspired by Mol's praxiographical approach and Zhan's study of worldling of CM, we ethnographically follow articulations of four modes and moves of CM and their relations to biomedicine. 1) "Medical acupuncture" which was developed as a method within state-socialist biomedicine guided by "scientific materialism" and supported by e.g. industrial production of acupuncture needles and electro-acupuncture devices. 2) A dissident CM cultivated by practitioners during socialism who embraced an alternative (non-biomedical) theory of body, health and disease and was practiced in grey zones of biomedical facilities or on practitioners' family members and friends. 3) The "traditional Chinese medicine" gaining strength after 1989 when private clinics and other institutions (schools and the Chamber of TCM) were gradually established by bottom up efforts of local practitioners, with a mix of ignorance, denial and cautious interest from biomedical establishment. 4) Recent efforts to introduce CM to the public healthcare system with a strong political support from both Czech and Chinese governments and corporate businesses, which induced a heated controversy in the Czech medical circles and the public space on evidence-based medicine, limits of biomedicine and the economy and geopolitics of healthcare.