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Theory, Culture & Society
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Complementary Medicine: Cosmopolitan and Popular Knowledge, and Transcultural Translations - Cases from Urban Mexico

Valentina Napolitano

Centre of Latin American Studies and a Research Fellow at Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge

Gerardo Mora Flores

Centro De Investigación en Sistemas De Salud in the National Institute of Public Health, Cuernavaca, Mexico

This article discusses some aspects of the practice of complementary and traditional medicine in urban Mexico through a transcultural paradigm, hence it focuses on how medical knowledge(s) are commodified as well as how a `travelling' medical knowledge acquires agency in a transculturation process. This study, while analysing different practices of Chinese and Japanese medicine, argues that oriental medicine is translated in at least two ways - a popular and a cosmopolitan form - that shape particular expressions of citizenship. The popular form is carried out in low-income neighbourhoods and it focuses around a `Mexicanization' of oriental medicine and the reaffirmation of the popular as part of the national. Cosmopolitan medicine, on the other hand, is particularly practised in exclusive health spas and seeks to purge the popular out of the national and to incorporate `traditional' medicine as one of the multiple components of cosmopolitan consumption. The article argues that both popular and cosmopolitan expressions are important to understanding how complementary and oriental medicine have become not only part of a global market, but also part of a particular history of national and popular medical systems.

Key Words: alternative medicine • Chinese medicine • citizenship • medicina popular • Mexico • transculturation

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, No. 4, 79-95 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/02632764030204006
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