Presentation Information
[SY-6-03]Feeling Inner Qi: Sensory and Affective experiences of Guo Lin Qigong in a Chinese Anti-Cancer Organization
*Xinzhe Huang (Ritsumeikan University(Japan))
Keywords:
qigong,cancer,affect
This presentation examines the practice of Guo Lin Qigong within a grassroots anti-cancer organization in China, focusing on the generation and transformation of bodily sensations and affect. Guo Lin Qigong has become a central therapeutic modality among many contemporary anti-cancer groups across China, with an estimated ten million individuals having engaged in its practice. Distinct from other qigong forms, it explicitly targets a specific illness, cancer, and places the unique concept of neiqi (inner qi) at the core of its healing system. While its founder, Guo Lin, drew upon traditional qigong theory and classical Chinese medicine, she also actively incorporated contemporary scientific discourses to construct a multifaceted understanding of neiqi and its therapeutic efficacy. Recent anthropological studies of spiritual healing have increasingly shifted focus from symbolic interpretation to the sensory and affective dimensions of experience. Within this framework, neiqi is not merely an abstract concept but emerges through practitioners’ embodied, lived experience. This presentation explores how neiqi becomes meaningful through specific bodily techniques and therapeutic processes aimed at cancer, and how these practices evoke and shape affective experiences. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how Guo Lin Qigong mobilizes sensory and emotional experiences, contributing to participants’ perceptions of healing. By examining these embodied dynamics, I aim to elucidate how the therapeutic efficacy of Guo Lin Qigong emerges through “feeling with” both the techniques and the environments of practice, resonating with the symposium’s broader framework of healing as contingent, affective, and relational.