Professor Elisabeth Hsu
Professor Elisabeth Hsu is a Governing Body Fellow, Green Templeton College, and Professor of Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
Teaching and research
Elisabeth was recruited in 2001 into the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), now part of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME), to design and teach two master’s courses, namely the MSc conversion course and the formative MPhil research programme, which, with one colleague of biological anthropology, they led together until his recent retirement.
Elisabeth’s teaching and research integrates: social/medical anthropology, ethnobotany, sensory anthropology, the phenomenology of the body and language, textual studies, semantics and pragmatics, and ethnographic method. Her thematic focus is on Chinese medicine, past and present, in mainland China and overseas.
Elisabeth learned standard modern Chinese (putonghua) in the People’s Republic of China, in 1978-79; and she studied in Chinese with Chinese students the Fundamentals of Chinese medicine and Classical Chinese for medics through doing ‘participant experience’ in her fieldwork of 1988-89; she also made eight field excursions into remote areas of Southwest China (published in 1998); and she did ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa for one month each from 2001 to 2008.
Elisabeth’s research is unique for the way it combines textual studies with insights from ethnographic fieldwork in regard of Chinese pulse diagnosis in the Han (The Historical Records, chapter 105 B) and in the Tang (Dunhuang medieval medical manuscripts), of the martial arts (Yijin jing) from the Ming and Qing to today, and, since 2011, in regard of over two thousand years of materia medica and formulary literature on the herbal antimalarial plant qinghao (Artemisia annua L.), research conducted within an eight heads strong group of European and Chinese professors and students of Chinese medicine.
