Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China [Hardcover]

Nancy N. Chen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 2003

The charismatic form of healing called qigong, based on meditative breathing exercises, has achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Qigong served a critical social organizational function, as practitioners formed new informal networks, sometimes on an international scale, at a time when China was shifting from state-subsidized medical care to for-profit market medicine. The emergence of new psychological states deemed to be deviant led the Chinese state to "medicalize" certain forms while championing scientific versions of qigong. By contrast, qigong continues to be promoted outside China as a traditional healing practice. Breathing Spaces brings to life the narratives of numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats, revealing the varied and often dramatic ways they cope with market reform and social changes in China.

Editorial Reviews

Review

For readers sometimes puzzled by recent mind-body movements in China and responses by central and regional governments, Chen's clear and scholarly presentation will prove most helpful. This book becomes even more important now that the movement and others like it have spread globally, including to Europe, the New World, and the US. Highly recommended.

(Choice )

The book's originality lies both in its focus on the medicalization process and psychiatry, and in a theoretically innovative approach based on the medicalization process and psychiatry, and in a theoretically innovative approach based on the concepts of body politics and spaces.... Breathing Spaces is incontestably a very valuable contribution to medical anthropology and religious studies in the context of Chinese culture, and to global cultural studies.

(Evelyne Micollier Journal of Chinese Religions )

Review

Before there was Falun Gong, there was qigong psychosis; and before that qigong was a traditional healing methodology and health enhancing practice. Nancy Chen tells the whole story, along the way connecting masters and practitioners of breathing techniques and meditation to the major cultural, political, economic, and moral transformations that China has undergone in the last several decades of economic change. But Chen's interesting and useful account is also a story of psychiatry and globalization, making for a rich and bubbling hot pot of ideas, practices, and embodied experience.

(Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; 1St Edition edition (July 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231128045
• ISBN-13: 978-0231128049
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,177,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Read, October 23, 2006

By 

M. Brophy "mb" (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (Hardcover)

This book is a good read for anyone interested in the cultural rise of qigong in China post 1920's as well as other cultural influences on the health care in China. This book is more of a report of events and research than of any type of teachings that other qigong books may offer. The book covers a wide variety of topics and attempts to answer some tough questions with regards to qigong and health care. A good read on Chinese culture.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Making the Simple Seem Complicated, July 27, 2008

By 

Milarepa (CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Breathing Spaces (Paperback)

This is essentially an exploration of the circumstances surrounding the government crackdown on the Falun Gong craze that swept Red China in the 1990's. Unfortunately, this wasn't clear until the end of the book. This book might be interesting to an anthropologist accustomed to dense writing but I don't think it's very useful, or interesting, to the non-scholar.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Breathing spaces, December 21, 2009

By 

A. Thomas (netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Breathing Spaces (Paperback)

Breathing spaces by Nancy N. Chen shows a good connection between psychiatry and Qigong. It gives a rare insight to the non-Chinese practizing qigong and psychiatry.
Aliza