Mei Zhan

Associate 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. Professor Zhan conducted field research on the “worlding” of traditional Chinese medicine in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area over a ten-year period (1995-2005).  This multi-sited research focuses on the processes of interaction, rupture, and displacement in the translocal formation of knowledges, identities, and communities.  Professor Zhan’s research and writing highlight that what we have come to call “traditional Chinese medicine” is made through—rather than prior to—various translocal encounters and from discrepant locations.  Her work shows that 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 healthcare and lifestyle practice in urban China after the outbreak of SARS, a zoonotic (animal-borne) disease, in spring 2003.  She investigates the emergence of varied middle-class lifestyles and subjectivities, especially the ways in which urbanites negotiate intimate and vexed relations with animals and things in their capacity as food, medicinal remedies, sources of contamination and danger, disease carriers, companions, and personal properties.

Professor Zhan currently serves as the Co-Editor of book reviews for American Ethnologist.  Please direct correspondence regarding American Ethnologist book reviews to aebookreviews at gmail dot com.

Selected publications:

Other-Worldly: Chinese medicine through encounters. In press at Duke University Press.

“A Doctor of the Highest Caliber Treats an Illness before It Happens.” Medical Anthropology, special issue on the globalization of Chinese Medicine, 28:2, forthcoming in 2009.

 “Wild Consumption: privatizing responsibilities in the time of SARS.”  In Privatizing China.  Edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong.  Cornell University Press, 2008, pp. 156-161.

“Civet Cats, Fried Grasshoppers, and David Beckham’s Pajamas: unruly bodies after SARS,” American Anthropologist, 2005, 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.