Exploring how cultures heal—and what healing means to us all.
Welcome from the Team
At Healing Anthropology, our primary goal is to honor diverse ways of healing by amplifying the voices of healers and connecting medical practitioners with cultural understanding. We collaborate with alternative medicine practitioners, patients, as well as modern medical workers to archive their unique narratives.
Initiate A Project
If you are inspired by our work—collecting stories of healing, exploring alternative medicine, or bridging culture and care—we’d love to hear from you. Whether you wish to organize a workshop, conduct field research, or share your own reflections and observations, reach out to us. Let’s begin something meaningful together.
Past Topics
We selected some of the most representative topics in the past—both in offline workshops and field research.
They are presented below.
Medicine in Motions
A field research in Lijiang, Yunnan, southwest China.
It traces how patients, healers, and institutions move through a plural medical field, where motion itself becomes survival and politics—mediating negotiation, resistance, and adaptation between local healing traditions and state power.
Women As Healers
Across cultures, women have long been the quiet custodians of healing—midwives, herbalists, caregivers, and storytellers who wove health into daily life. Their knowledge formed invisible networks of care that sustained communities. This workshop explores those traditions and asks how their wisdom might find new life today: in community medicine, in the ethics of care, and in the rebalancing of voices within modern healthcare systems.
Transformation of Pain
A field research in Garze, Sichuan, southwest China.
It explores how Tibetan Buddhist doctrines reframe pain from a biomedical symptom into a mode of religious subjectivity and spiritual cultivation: the body becomes a religious body, where pain functions as a technology of the self—transforming affliction into meaning and a path toward liberation.
A Peek Into Modern Psychiatry
A young researcher visited a Psychiatry Hospital to explore the intersections between modern psychiatry, alternative healing, and human emotion. From meditation rooms filled with singing bowls and mandala flags to clinical wards lined with psychological scales, she observed both the tenderness and rigidity of modern mental health care. Her field notes trace this delicate space between science and spirit—between the measurable and the felt—asking what it truly means to heal, and who gets to define it.