| Better known as a Chinese internal martial art, baguazhang can also be considered a discipline for the cultivation of health. At its heart lies neigong ("internal work"), a legacy of Daoists' search for a transcendent immortality. As a union of meditative and combative practices, baguazhang is believed to promote physical, psychological, and spiritual health. Specifically, its practitioners attempt to integrate the heart-mind (xin) and body-person (shen) of Chinese ethnophysiology in order to cultivate qi (breath or vital energy)---the key to a hypercognized ideal of health that is considered both mundane and "extra-ordinary." Thus, baguazhang (and its underlying worldview) challenges persistent universalizing notions of health as absence of illness (and of self as Cartesian mind-body duality) within otherwise critical anthropological scholarship. These challenges occur not only in theory, but also in practice, if claims of practitioners' experiences are to be believed. Based on in-depth fieldwork with a small group of baguazhang practitioners in Beijing using complementary experience-near methodologies, I argue that internal or energy traditions such as internal martial arts should be taken seriously for what they can reveal about universal as well as culturally variable health, bodies, and embodiment. The data indicate that individuals' particular motivations, beliefs/knowledge, experiences, and backgrounds affected their relationship to the practice---including their attendance to and interpretation of embodied phenomena. But the data also suggest that the practice itself may "work" as a comprehensive health modality, and in ways both convergent with and divergent from science. In light of this, I propose that coherent understandings of energy-based traditions necessitate a critically inclusive anthropology that can bridge the epistemological divide between global biomedical and local traditional paradigms. |
