Moving through life: an exploration of Londoners who practice tai chi and qigong
How does the practice of tai chi and qigong transform people?
Why do Londoners turn to tai chi and qigong? How do those practices transform their lives and their conceptions of health?
Within anthropology, little is known about how Londoners interact with Chinese health practices such as tai chi and qigong. Stepping away from biomedicine’s epistemological stance, this dissertation uses a phenomenological approach to analyse the lived experiences of Londoners who practice tai chi and qigong and investigates how these Chinese practices transform them and their conceptions of health.
Data was collected through eight weeks of participant observation across multiple tai chi and qigong classes and seven semi-structured interviews with both teachers and students. Findings are presented according to Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s ‘three bodies’ framework (1987): the body politic, the social body and the individual body.
Chapter three: Transforming the body politic. These chinese practices promote an alternative epistemology to the one Londoners are used to. In this chapter I show how teachers legitimise this new epistemology and how students come to adopt it. Students are empowered to trust their bodily sensations are legitimate sources of knowledge and truth. I find that this new framework enables people to challenge identities prescribed to them by the norms of the body politic - for instance of “old”, “masculine”, “ill” and find the agency to create new ones. Tai chi and qigong enables people to transform their political identity.
Chapter four: Transforming the social body. Self and other are inextricable entangled. Firstly I show that the focus on bodily sensations fostered by these chinese practices strengthens a sense of self. A stronger sense of self enables people to develop healthier and more ethical relationships with others. I further argue that paired exercises foster ethical interactions by teaching practitioners to attune to other social bodies. Finally, I highlight how this increased attunement can improve the therapeutic encounter.
Chapter five: Transforming the individual body. By growing an awareness of their bodily sensations, practitioners become better able to manage their emotions and health. Breathing exercises specifically help people regulate their anxiety by moving their focus down from their brain to their body. Feeling the flow of qi through ones body invites people to feel for new sensations. To elicit these new sensations, teachers use a variety of linguistic tools including poetry. The ability to feel one’s body in a new way is very powerful - especially for older people or chronically ill people who are used to feeling their body only in a certain way. Tai chi and qigong foster new possibilities for being-in-the-world at the level of the individual body. People can find a new relationship with their bodies .
Overall, I found that these Chinese body cultivation techniques enable Londoners to develop an embodied sense of agency, which I argue provides people with new possibilities of ‘being-in-the-world’. In other words, it is the phenomenological nature of tai chi and qigong which makes people feel better. Furthermore, it is the moving nature of these sensorial practices that brings people a renewed sense of agency, illustrating Farnell’s theory of dynamic embodiment (2012). Thanks to these practices, Londoners redefine and renegociate conceptions and expectations of “health” and mend their relationships with the world, others and themselves - which are often broken in the case of illness, and especially chronic illness.
Methdologically, I would like to highlight two important factors. First that phenomenology is a useful lens for medical anthropology to work from: starting from participants Lebenswelt and focussing on their subjectivities enable researchers to look beyond their own cultural medical paradigms and identify new conceptions of health. Secondly, Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s three bodies framework is useful to map out (health) transformations and should be used in future investigations of the adoption of ‘foreign’ health practices by Western populations.