Gary Seaman

Chinese herbal medicines have a long and venerated history. We follow the forays of a "barefoot doctor" to the mountains to collect herbs in central Taiwan, and observe his religious practices to cure his patients using these herbal medicines as well as summoning spiritual forces. This film reveals the cultural and religious context of Chinese medicines—the intertwined dimensions of physical and spiritual energy that relate to human fate.

In the 1970s Dr. Gary Seaman made a series of ethnographic films featuring village life in a Taiwanese mountain village. This film merges images from Taiwan with verbal ethnographic description from Fujian to provide the audience with a multimodal integration of visual and written ethnography of Chinese social life.