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A major challenge of medical anthropology is to assess how biomedicine, as a vaguely-defined set of diverse texts, technologies, and practitioners, shapes the experience of self and body. Through narrative analyses of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 158 pregnant women in southern California, this paper explores how the culture of biomedicine, encountered formally at prenatal care check-ups and informally through diverse media, influences pregnant women's perceptions of appropriate prenatal behavior. In the spirit of recent social scientific work that draws on and challenges Foucauldian insights to explore social relations in medicine, we posit a spectrum of compliance and resistance to biomedical norms upon which individual prenatal practices are assessed. We suggest that pregnancy is, above all, characterized by a split subjectivity in which women straddle the authoritative and the subjugated, the objective and the subjective, and the haptic as well as the optic, in telling and often strategic ways. In so doing, we identify the intersection between the disciplinary practices of biomedicine and the practices of pregnant women as a means of furnishing more fruitful insights into the oft-used term "power" and its roles in constituting social relations in medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores ways in which Chinese healing practices have undergone acculturation in the United States since the early 1970s. Reacting to what is perceived as biomedicine's focus on the physiological, those who describe themselves as favoring a holistic orientation often use the language of "energy blockage" to explain illness, whether thought of as "physical," "emotional," or "spiritual." Acupuncture in particular has been appropriated as one modality with which to "unblock" such conditions, leading to its being used by some practitioners in conjunction with more psychotherapeutic approaches which include valuing the verbalizing of feelings. Some non-Chinese practitioners in the United States, returning to older Chinese texts to develop "an American acupuncture," are reinserting diagnoses eliminated from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) by the People's Republic of China as "superstition." The assumption has been that many such diagnostic categories refer to psychological or spiritual conditions, and therefore may be useful in those American contexts which favor this orientation. Among these categories are those drawn from traditions of demonology in Chinese medicine. What was once a religious category in China turns psychological in the American setting. At the same time, many who use these terms have, since the late 1960s, increasingly conflated the psychological and the religious, the latter being reframed as "spiritual." Thus, this indigenization of Chinese practices is a complex synthesis which can be described as simultaneously medical, psychotherapeutic, and religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]