Body, Feeling, and Time: Sensemaking Narratives of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Urban USA

In contemporary urban USA, Traditional Chinese Medicine(hereinafter, abbreviated as TCM) is increasingly sought out by ordinary Americans as a form of alternative and/ or complementary medicine. How do American patients unfamiliar with theories of TCM-make sense of how the treatments they receive (in the present) work as a method of treating bodily and emotional illnesses (in the future)? Based on ethnographic data gathered at a TCM-acupuncture practice in Philadelphia, PA, what is shown is that American patients engage in a process of (a) learning how to reanalyze the physical sensations of the past and present as indexical signs of an (im)balanced qi, and (b) learning how to construct a meta-narrative of future states of TCM healing, which utilize subjectively-felt sensations and emotions as temporal anchors by which past and present stories of illness and future stories of cure can be linked. Actual healing for American patients experiencing 'foreign' TCM treatments, then, can be understood as a process that begins at the moment when the patients start to individually learn how to semiotically interpret the relationship between the body/mind, feeling, and time, and when they are equipped with the capacity to reproduce a meta-narrative of individual healing.