Experiences, Expressions, and Boundary-Crossings: East Asian Tactile Diagnostics in South Korea

Pulse diagnosis has remained underexamined in medical anthropology, despite the potential of ethnographic investigation to enrich and enliven the discussion of the tactility-centered practice and its associated issues of experience, language, and the body. By capturing boundary-crossing interactions between the diagnosing and diagnosed, experience and expression, and activity and passivity, in this article I provide ethnographic details of how East Asian tactile diagnostics operate. My argument illustrates various ways of knowing and experiencing things and beings, hitherto dominated by vision and visualization as well as the divide between active knower and fixed objects.