Search

Objectives: This study describes the development and feasibility of Integrative Nutritional Counseling (INC), a Chinese medicine (CM)+biomedicine-based nutrition curriculum for Chinese Americans with type 2 diabetes. Although Chinese Americans often incorporate CM principles into their diet, scant research has explored how to integrate CM with biomedical nutrition standards in a culturally appropriate manner or if such a program could improve diabetes self-management. Design: This is a 1-month pre-post study design including three points of contact: baseline, in-person class, and 1-month follow-up. Subjects: Participants (n = 15) were Cantonese-speaking/reading Chinese Americans diagnosed with type 2 diabetes who had used some form of CM/medicinal foods in the last 12 months. Interventions and Outcome Measures: The INC program included baseline surveys and a CM intake interview conducted by a licensed acupuncturist. The acupuncturist generated a CM diagnosis, which was shared with the participant, and used this diagnosis to tailor brief nutrition education. To bolster this brief education, a bilingual registered dietitian provided a 2-h group education class in Cantonese to all participants, during which time participants also received a Chinese/English INC booklet. Participants completed surveys immediately after the class and at 1-month follow-up, with qualitative exit interviews. Results: Participants reported improved attitudes and dietary habits aligning directly with INC, and improvement in biomedically valued measures of type 2 diabetes, such as weight loss, and CM-valued measures of digestion/elimination and hot/cold feeling. Satisfaction with INC was high, but challenges included confusion with some INC information, structural barriers, and comorbidities. Conclusions: Chinese Americans with type 2 diabetes and interventionists found integrative nutrition approaches acceptable and feasible. Future research should examine INC with a larger population and explore optimal delivery of INC given reported challenges.

Drawing on linguistic and biocultural anthropological perspectives on embodiment, this paper advances a "biolinguistic" approach to ethnographic research on intimacy, attending simultaneously to the co‐constitutive interactive, psychophysiological, and phenomenological processes that emerge in everyday embodied interaction between long‐term, cohabitating romantic partners. Through concurrent attention to natural interactions captured during video ethnography and moment‐to‐moment shifts in heart‐rate variability, this study complements and complicates existing psychological, communication, and anthropological research on intimacy. Three case‐studies of long‐term couples residing in the Southeastern United States demonstrate how neither pure psychophysiology nor pure linguistic analysis fully encapsulates potential patterns of intimacy among them. Rather, this microanalytical, biolinguistic approach to the complexities of body and language interplay, in treating embodiment and interaction as bidirectional phenomena, emphasizes that meanings and enactments of intimacy might look different for each couple and can change over time in complex ways that index couples' enduring orientations towards various cultural and relational norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the heart and brain metaphors used in the meaning-making efforts of Chinese individuals diagnosed with depression. Past studies assert that the origin of Chinese language metaphors for thinking and feeling can be found in traditional Chinese medico-philosophical theory, where the heart is viewed as the seat of thought and emotion, and the brain, which constitutes the cognitive center in western theories of the self, is secondary. While most participants employed heart metaphors to express thinking and feeling, many of the participants also employed brain metaphors. Instead of suggesting that this multiplicity implies westernization, this paper argues that cultural understandings of the self can be multiple. To appreciate this, it is necessary to look at spontaneously generated speech in a narrative context. This paper thus analyzes three participant narratives, a process that carries several implications for studies approaching the relationship between metaphor, culture, and the self.

Bakhtin observed that language is inherently dialogic as speakers respond to past utterances and anticipate future ones. Yet Bakhtin also noted that speakers can engage in monologic projects in attempts to unify voices and accents in the service of a single "carrier," such as God or nation. I argue that monologism and dialogism are copresent tendencies in speech and that they can be analyzed productively in relation to a third term, "silence," which can be dialogic as well as monologic. To attend to silence, it becomes necessary to examine monologically and dialogically oriented participant structures, pulling language ideologies and practices into the same analytical frame. I analyze the relationships between monologism and monologue, dialogism and dialogue, and silence in ritual speech at Spiritualist services. At these events, audience members silently generate healing energy, and mediums construct what I call "hinged dialogues" in which they have largely silent conversations with spirit figures and connect these conversations with living audience members who are compelled to respond in constrained but dialogically productive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on what we define as scalar intimacy in the stories people tell about their embodied experience as sociohistorical beings. Our analysis, based on ethnographic studies in Northern Italy (Perrino) and Beijing, China (Pritzker), examines the ways in which speech participants draw upon various discursive strategies to 'zoom in' and 'pan out' of both time and space, placing themselves and their activities in relation to various people, ideologies, and practices. Scalar intimacy, we argue, provides a novel framework for understanding the multiple ways in which people use language to scale their embodied experience in relation to culturally situated ideas and forms. Scalar intimacy thus extends the study of scales and fractal recursivity in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. It also contributes to scholarship focusing on how culturally situated meanings are reproduced and challenged over time through specific interactions. (China, chronotope, identity, intimacy, narrative, Northern Italy, scales) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines talk about the body in interactions between patients and their complementary/alternative providers (CAM), integrative physicians (IM), or conventional physicians. In an analysis of 603 consultations, we focus on instances where the body is spoken of in agentive terms. We thus examine particular micro-interactive moments where the body is constituted as an agent that speaks, responds, and otherwise acts in ways that direct the flow of conversation or the medical decision-making process. With this data, we demonstrate how body-as-agent metaphors in the clinical encounter underscore the communicative agency of providers and position the body as an interlocutor or 'third speaker' in conversation with the patient and provider. We further note that we found only limited differences in the ways body-as-agent metaphors were used by CAM/IM and conventional providers. Rather than arguing that such differences demonstrate a fundamental divide between CAM/IM and conventional approaches, we therefore suggest that these kinds of supportive body-as-agent talk exist as opportunities for all providers to support patients in taking a more active stance in managing their relationship with their body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]