Traditional Chinese Medicines in Motion and the Dual Narratives of Ethnic Culture Preservation and Professionalization in Malaysia

• In Event: Transformations in Asian Healthcare: Commercialization, Institutions, and Identities

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCM) in Malaysia as an arena of politics by investigating the responses of various TCM groups to the state initiated regulation and professionalization of traditional and complementary medicine (T/CM), which is itself a response to WHO's policy on traditional medicine and the wider trend of commodification of traditional medicine over the past decade.

Informed by pluralist perspective, this paper not only examines the significance of TCM in regards to its modern biomedical counterpart, but also views it as a heterogeneous field of various competing forces. The interplay of diverse forces is probed at both organizational as well as discursive levels within the field and varied responses by various groups to the state initiated regulation. The paper also views TCM as a field of healing practices through which various conceptions, such as those of ethnicity and professionalization, are imagined, played out and contested. It is also an arena where diverse range of societal groups, between TCM and modern biomedical groups as well as within the TCM communities, come to contest for cultural authority and power.

This paper argues that TCM practitioners are not passive receiver of state policies nor merely victims of the dominant ideology of western medicine. Rather, they are active players that are able to appropriate prevailing discourses to reinvent their respective significance, and thus shaping the therapeutic landscape of Malaysia.

Author

• Heong Hong Por, Universiti Sains Malaysia