Nancy N. Chen

In this exploration of the central Chinese concept of qi, a team of authors trace its role in early texts and contemporary neuroscience to show how it continues to be relevant beyond China. As life-long scholars of qi related practices, Adam Frank, Nancy Chen, and Stephen Field offer new insights into the significance of qi in the current Anthropocene. They connect Daoist studies, Chinese medicine, martial arts, popular culture, and historical phenomenology to examine the experience of qi as part of the natural world, as breathwork, as mind-body connections, and as an increasingly frequent referent in film, comic books, and medicinal products. This interdisciplinary conversation includes explorations of qi in the context of ancient texts, performing arts, medical anthropology, and consciousness studies. Their approach allows them to reveal the fundamental role qi plays in our shared experience of being human–in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the fractured identities with which many of us contend. Covering its earliest inception in the minds of Chinese proto-scientists to its function in our transglobal world, this co-authored work opens up novel ways of studying brains, minds and the spaces we now inhabit.

The charismatic form of healing called qigong, based on meditative breathing exercises, has achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Qigong served a critical social organizational function, as practitioners formed new informal networks, sometimes on an international scale, at a time when China was shifting from state-subsidized medical care to for-profit market medicine. The emergence of new psychological states deemed to be deviant led the Chinese state to "medicalize" certain forms while championing scientific versions of qigong. By contrast, qigong continues to be promoted outside China as a traditional healing practice. Breathing Spaces brings to life the narratives of numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats, revealing the varied and often dramatic ways they cope with market reform and social changes in China.