Performing Expertise without Experts: Barefoot Doctor Program and Medical Expertise in Rural China

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Lay Expertise and Boundary Work

Abstract

During China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a large number of lay medical workers—the “barefoot doctors”—were trained in a short period and worked in rural areas to provide primary medical care while continuing their farmwork. The barefoot doctor program demonstrates an experimental collaboration between experts and lay people. Recent scholarship has primarily examined the role of the barefoot doctor program in introducing Western medicine into rural China (Fang 2012; Pang 2017). However, these literatures are often less engaged with social interaction among various actors in the program, and their insights have yet to be brought into theorizing the barefoot doctor program as a network of medical expertise.

As a historical study of socialist China’s public health program, this paper extends the social theory of expertise in a distinct social and political context. Drawing on the concept of “boundary objects” proposed by Star and Griesemer (1989) and Gil Eyal’s (2013) theory of expertise, this paper investigates how the barefoot doctor program emerged as a new network of medical expertise in rural China. I argue that the barefoot doctor program “outsourced” medical and health services from experts to lay people, while also creating a new form of medical expertise that was responsive to local needs and capable of taking on a wide range of medical tasks. In this network, barefoot doctors work as a key node, bridging rural residents and professional medical doctors together. As a result, the power of professional experts was diminished, while the network of medical expertise was extended and strengthened.

Author

• Chang Liu, New School For Social Research