The Blue Economy

If you have seen the new title, The Blue Economy;  10 Years; 100 Innovations; 100 Million Jobs , we have just announced on-site, you know that this book is a bit of a departure for us. Since 1983 when our first Paradigm Publications book reached print, with very few exceptions we have concentrated our publishing resources on two subjects, Japanese Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. The practical way to make these ways of health promotion and disease remediation broadly available is for them to achieve a socially and economically viable role. With both subjects our bias has been that to successfully acculturate these arts as functioning parts of our own culture, we must understand them as whole systems. It is not enough to take just what appeals to us – what satisfies western minds for western reasons. We must have, as Zorba said “The whole catastrophe!”♦ This means being honest about East Asian medicines' histories and blemishes and having the courage to study and understand those aspects that are difficult and foreign.

My, I don't write very often do I? I suppose that is OK given the great volumes of stuff that gets onto the web.

I would like to comment on prices in response to a recent flurry of emails.  For those who wrote wondering why Paradigm titles are sometimes more expensive on the discount sites than at Redwing or in school bookstores, I need to briefly explain how book prices work and why there is such considerable variability.  Prices are set by publishers as “cover prices” (the amount printed on the book cover), as “suggested retail price” or as “lowest advertised prices;” the difference being that the latter approach attempts to set a minimum level on advertisements based on price.   These prices were once what a book was sold for.  However since the traditional retail store has become an endangered species, book trade references have become much less available and people have come to depend on on-line sites for price information.  Practically then, what you pay for a book is more often determined by the seller than the publisher. 

This blog is more personally written than usual. I think the personal commentary makes it clear that what I am suggesting here comes from my individual experience and bias. Nonetheless, I believe the main idea , that of an outreach to the new Obama administration, has merit regardless of its roots in my personal life.

This is a talk about “piracy,” the unauthorized use of intellectual property. What brought this about is an incident where someone used the field's dis

Acupedia

I originally planned this post as review of the A.A.A.O.M. Portland Conference term meetings and seminars with a concentration on the announcement of "Acupedia," a wikipedia-style web site that will present different term lists for comparison. I labeled the post "The End of the Term Debate" to emphasize that the presence of such a tool meant the end of two ideas that have long retarded the development of CM in the English-speaking world; that is, the notion that translation standards would lead to some never-defined but supposedly horrid outcome and the idea that terminology was about the selection of words rather than the preservation of ideas.

There has been considerable discussion and an unusual amount of press coverage covering the German studies of acupuncture and their conclusions. This links to an example article. This discussion is a good example of how long it takes for the medical establishment to pay attention to work done on acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Stephen Birch covered this issue in his Ph.D. thesis at Exeter University, and in Understanding Acupuncture, a text that has been used in medical schools for nearly a decade.

This is the last blog post in the "Term Chaos is Just Chaos" series, the previous posts are:

Part 1: Where the Infringement Hides

Part 2: Not Just a Matter of Words

Part 3: Standards Are Not Shallow

Those who have read the "Guided Tour to the Term Debate" essay on this site, understand that I see term chaos as just the latest step in a twenty-plus year attempt to justify paraphrase and simplification as the primary strategy for educating clinicians in the English-speaking world. The earliest assertion was that Chinese medicine had no terminology, an idea that I feel derived from a lay view of Chinese medical language and a certain embarrassment about Chinese medical ideas that expresses itself in the urge to biomedicalize and de-moralize. Later, as Wiseman and others consistently refuted this notion, anti-consistency arguments migrated, arriving today at "term chaos," which is itself a euphemism for an undocumented plurality that is supposed to be good, despite the lack of any orderly plan for how students are to be taught.

Part Three: Standards Are Not Shallow

At the A.A.O.M. nomenclature meeting Dr. Bensky and his colleagues made some very dramatic assertions. One of these was the assertion that standards are a detriment to seeking the "depth" of meaning in Chinese concepts. Notably, Dr. Bensky failed to describe "depth" in any understandable or practical, way. This is very much like his declaration that the long-standing consensual principals of translation Marnae Ergil described are "wrong." We're to take his word for it. Let's not do that. Let's think for ourselves.