Processing Neuroelectric Data

Ten Thousand Things explores the many forms of life, or, inancient Chinese parlance "the ten thousand things" that life is and is becoming, incontemporary Beijing and beyond. Coauthored by an American anthropologist and a Chinese philosopher,the book examines the myriad ways contemporary residents of Beijing understand and nurture the goodlife, practice the embodied arts of everyday well-being, and in doing so draw on cultural resourcesranging from ancient metaphysics to modern media.

Farquhar and Zhang show thatthere are many activities that nurture life: practicing meditative martial arts among friends in apublic park; jogging, swimming, and walking backward; dancing, singing, and keeping pet birds;connoisseurship of tea, wine, and food; and spiritual disciplines ranging from meditation tolearning a foreign language. As ancient life-nurturing texts teach, the cultural practices thatproduce particular forms of life are generative in ten thousand ways: they "give birth to lifeand transform the transformations." This book attends to the patterns of city life, listens tohomely advice on how to live, and interprets the great tradition of medicine and metaphysics. In theprocess, a manifold culture of the urban Chinese everyday emerges. The lives nurtured, gathered, andwitnessed here are global and local, embodied and discursive, ecological and cosmic, civic andindividual. The elements of any particular life -- as long as it lasts, and with some skill anddetermination -- can be gathered, centered, and harmonized with the way things spontaneously go. Theresult, everyone says, is pleasure.

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China, and Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Qicheng Zhang is a Professor of Classical Medical Chinese and Cultural Studies at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and the author of many books on the Chinese heritage of life nurturing.