Assistant Professor of Anthropology (PhD: Stanford, 2002)
4137 Social Sciences Plaza A
(949) 824-8167
email: mzhan at uci dot edu

Professor Mei Zhan conducts research in the areas of medical anthropology, cultural and social studies of science, globalization and transnationalism, and China studies. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on the "worlding" of traditional Chinese medicine. In this ethnography, she highlights that what we have come to call "traditional Chinese medicine" is made through-rather than prior to-various translocal encounters and from discrepant locations. The fieldwork for this book was done in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. The book is multi-sited, however, also in its focus on the processes of interaction, rupture, and displacement in the translocal formation of knowledges, identities, and communities. She writes about how dynamic forms of traditional Chinese medicine emerge through specific kinds of encounters, as these encounters also produce uneven and shifting visions, understandings, and practices of what makes up the world and our places in it.

Professor Zhan is working on a new ethnographic project centered around the shifts in health education and everyday preventive practice after the SARS epidemic in China in spring 2003, with a focus on emerging middle-class lifestyles and subjectivities produced through the varied relations and boundaries between humans, and non-humans as food, remedies, pollutants, and pets.

Selected publications:

Other-Worldly: making Chinese medicine through encounters. Book manuscript in preparation.

"Wild Consumptions: privatizing responsibilities in the time of SARS." In Privatizing China. Edited by Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang. Cornell University Press. In press.

"Civet Cats, Fried Grasshoppers, and David Beckham's Pajamas: unruly bodies after SARS," American Anthropologist, 2005, vol. 107:1:31-42.

"Does It Take A Miracle? negotiating knowledges, identities and communities of traditional Chinese medicine," Cultural Anthropology, 2001, 16:4:453-480, special issue Anthropology and/in/of Science.