Along with other complementary and alternative medicines, traditional Chinese medicine's (TCM) use and popularity in the United States has skyrocketed within the last ten years. Research in a variety of fields has focused on issues such as why people are using TCM and whether or not this medicine is scientifically efficacious. This dissertation comes from an Ethnography of Communication background and presents a discursive construction of TCM that highlights the ways in which communication constructs understandings of health and TCM health practice as culturally situated.; Chapter One begins with a review of relevant literature in the areas of health communication, medical anthropology, and traditional Chinese medicine. I also present the Ethnography of Communication and the research questions that guided my project. In Chapter Two, I provide a description of my data collection and analysis. Chapters Three through Five construct a discursive landscape of TCM as seen in participants' talk. In Chapter Three I describe the TCM discursive construction of health as a matter of qi, balance and holism. In Chapter Four, I present East and West as philosophical bases from which participants draw in constructing their understandings of TCM and health care more generally. In Chapter Five I explore the way food, both as an everyday form of health treatment and as a symbolic gift, work to construct TCM as an everyday health practice.
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