In this exploration of the central Chinese concept of qi, a team of authors trace its role in early texts and contemporary neuroscience to show how it continues to be relevant beyond China.

As life-long scholars of qi related practices, Adam Frank, Nancy Chen, and Stephen Field offer new insights into the significance of qi in the current Anthropocene. They connect Daoist studies, Chinese medicine, martial arts, popular culture, and historical phenomenology to examine the experience of qi as part of the natural world, as breathwork, as mind-body connections, and as an increasingly frequent referent in film, comic books, and medicinal products.

This interdisciplinary conversation includes explorations of qi in the context of ancient texts, performing arts, medical anthropology, and consciousness studies. Their approach allows them to reveal the fundamental role qi plays in our shared experience of being human–in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the fractured identities with which many of us contend.

Covering its earliest inception in the minds of Chinese proto-scientists to its function in our transglobal world, this co-authored work opens up novel ways of studying brains, minds and the spaces we now inhabit.

Adam D. Frank is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College at University of Central Arkansas, USA.
Stephen L. Field is J.K. and Ingrid Lee Endowed Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Trinity University, San Antonio, USA.
Nancy N. Chen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA.