ISSN:
0378-8741
Language:
English
Titel der Quelle:
Journal of ethnopharmacology : an interdisciplinary journal devoted to bioscientific research on indigenous drugs
Publ. der Quelle:
Shannon : Elsevier Science Ireland
Angaben zur Quelle:
Vol. 167 (2015), p. 38
DDC:
610
Abstract:
The history of Chinese spices has received increasing attention in recent years, but little research been carried out on where they fit on the food-medicine continuum for early China, during the formation of the classical medical system. This paper describes how the synaesthetic qualities of spices attracted a particular analysis in that emerging system which serves to mark them as different to other medical materials and foodstuffs. We aim to clarify the special role created for spices to accommodate their boundary-crossing synaesthetic action on the body. This paper analyses the contents of several spice bags excavated in 1972 from a tomb that was closed in the second century BCE. It uses archaeological reports of material culture together with the early Chinese textual record, extant in both manuscripts and received texts, to bring out the role of spices in ritual, food and medicine. Noting that the flavours and aromas of early China were assigned physiological potency in the first centuries BCE, we argue that by medieval times the unique synaesthetic role that spices played in mediating the senses was systematically medicalised. While being deployed for the purpose of curing disease in medicine, they also remained within the realm of everyday healthcare, and religious practice, deployed both as aromatics to perfume the environment, attracting benign spirits, but also to ward off the agents of disease, as well as for enhancing health through their use in cookery. While foodstuffs entered the digestive system spices were all considered 'pungent' in the emerging clasical medical system. They acted on the body through the nose and lungs, making them neither food nor drug. This implicit categorisation medicalised spices which, like music, could affect the passions and lighten the spirit, codifying observations about the impact on the body of the ritual environment.
Note:
Copyright: Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.
DOI:
10.1016/j.jep.2014.12.008
URL:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25527313
