Acupuntura e Moxabustão

Abstract This article is a companion piece to my short film, Acupuntura e Moxabustão , which compares two acupuncture practices in São Paulo. The film features Shen Ping Liang, who arrived in São Paulo from Taipei and practiced acupuncture from 1971 to 1984, and Nilza Domingues, who founded a community clinic and school called the Associação de Terapias Tradicionais e Acupuntura that trained students from 2008 to 2015. In this article, I discuss the film’s production process and my attention to ethics and aesthetics, drawing on decolonial theory as articulated by scholars of the Global South. With social and political infrastructure shaping globalizing practices, urban community clinics further facilitated the movement of people, ideas, and objects in diasporic Asian medical practice and knowledge production. The film thus engages with discourses of modernity, skill, pedagogy, agency, and the state to move beyond Orientalist stereotypes of Asian medicine.