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Professor Elisabeth Hsu

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Professor Elisabeth Hsu

Professor of Anthropology

Unit Affiliation

Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford 

College Affiliation 

Governing Body Fellow of Green Templeton College

 

Professor of Anthropology, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford 

 

Elisabeth Hsu joined the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford as University Lecturer in Medical Anthropology in 2001 in order to set up its Medical Anthropology MSc and MPhil courses. She obtained Recognition of Distinction as Reader in Social Anthropology in 2006 and as Professor in Anthropology in 2010. Elisabeth Hsu is Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford.

She co-founded the ongoing Berghahn book series on “Epistemologies of Healing” in 2005, specifically to increase the reach of doctoral-research-based monographs. She also co-established the ongoing “Anthropology Research Group at Oxford on Eastern Medicines and Religions”, Argo-EMR, in 2006, for post-doctoral researchers interested in medical anthropological approaches to scholarly medical traditions. 

Elisabeth Hsu's research contributes to the fields of medical anthropology and ethnobotany; language and text critical studies; and the history of East Asian science, technology and medicine. Its focus is on Chinese medicine, and traditional and pre-twentieth century medicines more generally. It contributes to debates on medical education, the transmission of knowledge and practice; body and personhood; treatment modalities and their efficaciousness; pulse diagnosis; touch, pain, feelings and affect, cognition and emotions, and sensory experience.  Her latest ethnography Chinese Medicine in East Africa: An Intimacy with Strangers, published in 2022.
 

Contact

Email: elisabeth.hsu@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1865 274681
 

 

Spotlight

chinese medicine

Chinese Medicine in East Africa: An Intimacy with Strangers

July 2022 | Berghahn Books

Book cover showing a pencil drawing of an ancient garden with urns

Plants Health and Healing

On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthro

September 2010 | Berghahn Books

Circular grey pattern reminiscent of stones on blue back ground

An introduction to the medical anthropology of care and self-care

March 2025 | Medical Anthropology

Elisabeth Hsu's profile is highly transdisciplinary: she learned modern standard Chinese at the Beijing Language Institute in the People's Republic of China in 1978-79; completed the equivalent of a BSc and MSc in the Natural Sciences (Biology), Ecology, at ETH Zurich in 1979-84; a MPhil in General Linguistics in 1986-87 and a PhD in Social Anthropology in 1987-92, both from the University of Cambridge and thematically on Chinese Medicine. She thereupon worked as Assistant Professor in Social/Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social Anthropology of the University of Zurich from 1992-96; as Chiang Chingkuo Teaching and Research Fellow in the History of Chinese Science, Technology and Medicine at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the University of Cambridge from 1996-99; and as Swiss National Foundation Research Fellow from 1997-99. She completed her Habilitation in Chinese Studies on early Chinese pulse diagnosis at the University of Heidelberg in 2002, published in 2010 (CUP).

Elisabeth Hsu did long term field research in the PR China (Kunming city, Yunnan province, 1988-89; see monograph The Transmission of Chinese Medicine, CUP, 1999) and in East Africa (between 2001-08, 9 field trips; see monograph Chinese Medicine in East Africa: An Intimacy with Strangers, Berghahn, 2022). She also has conducted research into kinship and relatedness based on field trips into remote areas of Southwest China (1979-2009); on tactility in caring practices and technologies of the self after fieldwork in Huizhou (since 1997); and on the Neolithic gaze based on treks through historic English landscapes (since 2013, regularly). Finally, she has conducted ethnobiological and linguistic anthropological research, as well as textual translation work, into the interpretation of the practical applications of the herbal antimalarial qinghao in Chinese formulae and materia medica, namely the fangji and bencao literatures from 168 BCE-1911, in collaboration with academic staff working at the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel; in the Pharmacognosy team in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Bradford; and at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Universities of Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing.