“Kitchen Knowledge,” Desperate Foods, and Ritual Healing in Everyday Survival Strategies during the Great Famine in China, 1958--62 (2014)
Zhou, Xun (Author)
Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity
Volume: 7, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 384-404
Edition Details: Part of a special issue: Diversity of Medicine in China and Chinese Medicine in Europe
Language: Chinese
Famine is a social and economic crisis that is commonly accompanied by widespread of malnutrition, starvation, epidemic disease, and increased mortality. This paper focuses on the period of the Great Leap Famine in China between 1958 and 1962. Based on newly-collected oral interviews and archival evidence, it gives voices to ordinary villagers from different parts of China---from various counties in one of China's biggest and most populated Sichuan province in the southwest to Shandong in the east and Hunan in central China and examines their experiences and their survival strategies in times of hunger, illness, and death. It shows that an integral part of everyday famine culture, particularly in rural China, which was worst hit, concerns the kitchen knowledge and practice of healing and nutrition. Many traditional recipes that were used in previous times were rediscovered and used as everyday hunger-coping techniques. Some are dated back to the Ming dynasty---a few were recorded in Materia Medica for Famine Relief (Qiuhuang bencao , c. 1406). Using the methodology of oral history set against the historical background of traditional materia medica, this paper elicits how ordinary people in rural China devised complex and plural strategies to cope with fundamental biological crises.
...MoreArticle Bivins, Roberta (2014) Imagining Acupuncture: Images and the Early Westernization of Asian Medical Expertise. Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity (pp. 298-318).
Similar Citations
Article
Friesen, T. Max;
Stewart, Andrew;
(2013)
To Freeze or to Dry: Seasonal Variability in Caribou Processing and Storage in the Barrenlands of Northern Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB001201437/)
Book
Saverio Manetti;
Lucia Bigliazzi;
Luciana Bigliazzi;
(2020)
I grani, i pani e i popoli. Le antiche varietà di frumento, le «biade», le «piante esotiche» descritte da Saverio Manetti (1765) con le annotazioni autografe dell’autore
(/isis/citation/CBB365098940/)
Article
Niu, Yahua;
(2011)
From the National Institutes of Health to the Shanghai Drug and Food Administration: An Interview with Peng Sixun
(/isis/citation/CBB001221331/)
Article
Kin Sum Li;
(2022)
A Bowl of Good Tea in the Northern Song Dynasty: Using Modern Examples to Understand the Daguan chalun 大觀茶論
(/isis/citation/CBB521772318/)
Book
Kiple, Kenneth F.;
(2007)
A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization
(/isis/citation/CBB001422625/)
Article
Radford, Anthony;
Scragg, Roy;
(2013)
Discovery of Kuru Revisited: How Anthropology Hindered Then Enhanced Kuru Research
(/isis/citation/CBB001421857/)
Book
Gráda, Cormac Ó;
(2009)
Famine: A Short History
(/isis/citation/CBB001421560/)
Chapter
Gilman, Sander L.;
(2013)
Epidemics of Famine and Obesity: China as the Modern World
(/isis/citation/CBB001214660/)
Book
Micah S. Muscolino;
(2014)
The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950
(/isis/citation/CBB237574793/)
Article
Sarah Besky;
(June 2020)
Empire and indigestion: Materializing tannins in the Indian tea industry
(/isis/citation/CBB995845297/)
Book
Wallach, Jennifer Jensen;
(2013)
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001202133/)
Article
Laura Ann Twagira;
(2015)
Interrogating the "Machine" and Women's Things
(/isis/citation/CBB240477676/)
Article
Mosby, Ian;
(2009)
“That Won-Ton Soup Headache”: The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB000932791/)
Article
Liu, Xiangming;
(2008)
Laws on the Normalization of the Administration of Toxicants Inscribed on Han Bamboo Slips Unearthed in Zhangjiashan
(/isis/citation/CBB000933535/)
Article
Shapin, Steven;
(2014)
“You are what you eat”: Historical Changes in Ideas about Food and Identity
(/isis/citation/CBB001202088/)
Book
Siegel, Benjamin;
(2018)
Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India
(/isis/citation/CBB613365040/)
Book
Gunn, Geoffrey C.;
(2014)
Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power
(/isis/citation/CBB001422637/)
Book
Todd Tucker;
(2007)
The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science
(/isis/citation/CBB809511253/)
Book
Donald E. Crummey;
James C. McCann;
(2018)
Farming and Famine: Landscape Vulnerability in Northeast Ethiopia, 1889–1991
(/isis/citation/CBB878699508/)
Book
Sheila Zurbrigg;
(2018)
Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab: Weakened by Want
(/isis/citation/CBB453593524/)
Be the first to comment!