Commentary: Translation and Situation — Science, Metabolism, Finance

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research mainly concerns the historical situation of traditional Chinese medicine in modern China; she has also worked on popular cultures of health and the body, especially in Beijing. She is the author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (1994); Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (2002); and, with Qicheng Zhang, Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (2012).

John Kelly is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political anthropology, semiotic and military technologies, and anthropology of knowledge. He is the coeditor of Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (2010) and the author of “Writing and the State: China, India, and General Definitions,” in Margins of Writing, Origins of Culture, edited by Seth Sanders (2006), and “Seeking What? Subversion, Situation, and Transvaluation,” Focaal (winter 2012).