Localised Communities and Mass Healing Practice: The Case of Guangxi, China. Healing practice is a way of maintaining human health, embedded in the cultural values and social framework of a community. Healing practice in this article does not include any form of non-medical healing activities, such as praying to a God.
As a consequence, during the 1980s, the members of the village refused the government’s request for information about these herbs. The preceding comments indicate that mass healing practice and mass healing education were and continue to be viewed as an integral component of everyday life for members of local indigenous communities. Instead, the perceived expertise of such practitioners is more associated with their age or maturity.
The local geographic environments have continued to provide growing conditions for a wide range of medicinal plants. All this results, arguably, from the fact that the geographical features of those local communities cannot be fundamentally altered by such modernizing changes as the construction of new healthcare centres and roadways.
All the above suggests that the expanded family structured environment of mass healing practice and education in
Guangxi’s local communities is rooted in social and cultural construction and the geographically isolated nature of these communities.
It can also be argued that, along with distinguishing environmental features and people’s strong community-centred concern for their localised healing traditions as well as the highly practical nature of these traditions in people’s everyday life, various forms of mass healing practice could continue to exist, for the foreseeable future, even in the face of ever-increasing modernization and commercial development in today’s China.
