Paper short abstract:

Anatomy is regarded as the rite de passage for medical students. Taking an anatomy lab in Taiwan as the site, this fieldwork aims to elucidate the affect and material encounters of anatomy in an East Asian context.

Paper long abstract:

The discussion of East Asian anatomy practices focuses on Confucian and colonial conceptions of the body. In 21st Century Taiwan, these practices are often explained with the “medical humanities turn” back in the 1990s and the Tzu-Chi tradition, a donation and education model developed with a Buddhist discourse that regards the donors’ bodies as sanctificated silent mentors or dati laoshih (gross anatomy teachers). This fieldwork discloses different relations with the cadaver outside the Tzu-Chi tradition and its popular representation.

Through lab practices such as dealing with rouxie (meat crum), students are gradually brought into the stressful and ambivalent space and must endure and suppress negative affects that would still be manifested through jokes. The stressful and somewhat isolated space pushes students into liminality. Aside from the spatio-temporal arrangement, this fieldwork also focuses on materials, especially fascia, whose definition in anatomical nomenclature differs from the lab usage: it becomes the tissues removed in order to “zhochu (make)” structures on the checklist. Removing fascia is actually the most time-consuming activity in lab, and the empirical ontology of rouxie, fascia, and fats indicates the ambivalent and liminal character of the cadaver and the communitas in lab.

Analyzing material and affective conditions of the liminal, this fieldwork sketches anatomy as a rite de passage for both the life and dead. As a medical student, the practicing ethnographer of this fieldwork could serve as a case to discuss the role of anthropology, along with other “medical humanities,” after the medical education reform in the 1990s.