Books
Living Toward Justice: A Time Capsule
(Coming November 2025 from New Village Press)
Living Toward Justice offers an illustrated exploration of how practitioners and scholars in the field of embodied social justice(ESJ) seek to incorporate justice in everyday life. The book documents three collective time capsules from 2020 to 2022, during which fifty-two collaborators in the Living Justice Project responded to a series of prompts and activities to express “What does it look, feel, and sound like to live (towards) justice in your life?” Through photographs, video and audio recordings, and text-based reflections, they offer readers a vivid and immersive experience of embodying justice during a unique moment in history.
Learning to Love: Intimacy and the Discourse of Development in China
(University of Michigan Press, 2024)
Learning to Love offers a range of perspectives on the embodied, relational, affective, and sociopolitical project of “learning to love” at the New Life Center for Holistic Growth, a popular “mind-body-spirit” bookstore and practice space in northeast China, in the early part of the 21st century. This intimate form of self-care exists alongside the fast-moving, growing capitalist society of contemporary China and has emerged as an understandable response to the pressures of Chinese industrialized life in the early 21st century. Opening with an investigation of the complex ways newcomers to the center suffered a sense of being “off,” both in and with the world at multiple scales, Learning to Love then examines how new horizons of possibility are opened as people interact with one another as well as with a range of aesthetic objects at New Life. The book draws upon the core concepts of scalar intimacy—a participatory, discursive process in which people position themselves in relation to others as well as dominant ideologies, concepts, and ideals—and scalar inquiry—the process through which speakers interrogate these forms, their relationship with them, and their participation in reproducing them. In demonstrating the collaborative interrogation of culture, history, and memory, she examines how these exercises in physical, mental, and spiritual self-care allow participants to grapple with past social harms and forms of injustice, how historical systems of power continue in the present, and how they might be transformed in the future. By examining the interactions and relational experiences from New Life, Learning to Love offers a range of novel theoretical interventions into political subjectivity, temporality, and intergenerational trauma/healing.
Research Methods in Linguistic Anthropology
(Bloomsbury, 2022)
For research in linguistic anthropology, the successful execution of research projects is a challenging but essential task. Balancing research design with data collection methods, this textbook guides readers through the key issues and principles of the core research methods in linguistic anthropology. Designed for students conducting research projects for the first time, or for researchers in need of a primer on key methodologies, this book provides clear introductions to key concepts, accessible discussions of theory and practice through illustrative examples, and critical engagement with current debates. Topics covered include creating and refining research questions, planning research projects, ethical considerations for research, quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, data processing, data analysis, and how to write a successful grant application. Each chapter is illustrated by cases studies which showcase methods in practice, and are supported by activities and exercises, discussion questions, and further reading lists. Research Methods in Linguistic Anthropology is an essential resource for both experienced and novice linguistic anthropologists and is a valuable textbook for research methods courses.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion offers a variety of critical theoretical and methodological perspectives that interrogate the ways in which ideas about and experiences of emotion are shaped by linguistic encounters, and vice versa. Taking an interdisciplinary approach which incorporates disciplines such as linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication studies, education, sociology, folklore, religious studies, and literature, this book:
- explores and illustrates the relationship between language and emotion in the five key areas of language socialisation; culture, translation and transformation; poetry, pragmatics and power; the affective body-self; and emotion communities;
- situates our present-day thinking about language and emotion by providing a historical and cultural overview of distinctions and moral values that have traditionally dominated Western thought relating to emotions and their management;
- provides a unique insight into the multiple ways in which language incites emotion, and vice versa, especially in the context of culture.
With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion is an indispensable resource for students and researchers who are interested in incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on language and emotion into their work.
Living Translation: Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine
(Berghahn Books, 2014)
Living Translation integrates theoretical perspectives with carefully grounded ethnographic analyses of everyday interaction and experience, Living Translation examines the worlds of international translators as well as U.S. teachers and students of Chinese medicine, focusing on the transformations that occur as participants engage in a “search for resonance” with foreign terms and concepts. Based on a close examination of heated international debates as well as specific texts, classroom discussions, and interviews with publishers, authors, teachers, and students, Sonya Pritzker demonstrates the “living translation” of Chinese medicine as a process unfolding through interaction, inscription, embodied experience, and clinical practice. By documenting the stream of conversations that together constitute this process, the book thus traces the translation of Chinese medicine from text to practice with an eye towards the social, political, historical, moral, and even personal dimensions involved in the transnational production of knowledge about health, illness, and the body. Other publications are listed below.
Guides
(2020) Doing online Ethnography: An Overview of Central Issues and Methodological Strategies. Available here
Selected Journal Articles
(2025) Pritzker, S.E. with Living Justice Project collaborators. “Just Chronotopes: Embodiment, Social Justice, and ‘the Somatopic Imagination’.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Available (open access): https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jola.70015
(2023) Pritzker, S.E., J.A. DeCaro, J.A., B. Gall-Risley, L.T. Monocello, and J. Pederson. “Embodying Intimacy in Everyday Interaction: A Biolinguistic Study of Long-Term Partners in the Southeastern United States.” Ethos. Available here.
(2023) Pritzker, S.E. “What’s going on with my China? Political Subjectivity, Scalar Inquiry, and the Magical Power of Li Wenliang.” American Anthropologist. Available here.
(2022) Pritzker, S.E. and Hu, T. “The Face of Li Wenliang: Chronotopes and Scalar Intimacy on China’s ‘Wailing Wall.’”Language, Culture and Society. Available here
(2020) Language, Emotion, and the Politics of Vulnerability. Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 241-256. Available here
(2020) Pritzker, S.E., and S. Perrino. “Culture Inside: Scale, Intimacy and Chronotope in Situated Narratives.“ Language in Society. Available here
(2019) Pritzker, S.E., and W. Duncan. Technologies of the Social: Family Constellation Therapy and the Remodeling of Relational Selfhood in China and Mexico. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. Available here
(2018) Pritzker, S.E.,J. Guzman, K. Hui and D. Tarn. The Third Speaker: The Body as Interlocutor in Conventional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine. Communication & Medicine 14(3): 256: 267. Available here
(2018) Pritzker, S.E. Language and Emotion. In J. Jackson (ed). Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology.New York: Oxford University Press. (accessible online with subscription)
(2018) Leung, G., E. Ho, H.L. Chi, Y.Q. Chen, I. Ting, SY Huang, H. Zhang, S.E. Pritzker, E. Hsieh, & H.K. Seligman. “We (Tang) Chinese”: Cantonese Chinese Americans’ Identity Positioning for Health Management. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 11(4): 271-285.
(2018) Pritzker, S.E. and K. Liang. Semiotic Collisions and the Metapragmatics of Culture Change in Dr. Song Yujin’s “Chinese Medical Psychology.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology28(1): 43-66. Available here
(2017) Pritzker, S.E.Chinese Medical Pulse Diagnosis: An Analogy for Biomarkers in Medical Anthropology Research? Anthropology News 58(4), Available: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2017/12/11/chinese-medical-pulse-diagnosis/
(2016) Pritzker, S.E. Biocultural and Linguistic Anthropology: Points of Possible Convergence. Anthropology News, Available: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2016/05/09/points-of-possible-convergence/
(2016) Pritzker, S.E. New Age with Chinese Characteristics? Translating Inner Child Emotion Pedagogies in ContemporaryChina. Ethos 44(2): 150-170. Available here
(2015) Zhang, W.J, S.E. Pritzker, & K.K. Hui. Factors Affecting Definitions of and Approaches to Integrative Medicine: A Mixed Methods Study Examining China’s Integrative Medicine Development. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2015/458765/
(2014) Pritzker, S.E. & K.K. Hui. Introducing Considerations in the Translation of Chinese Medicine. Chinese Journal of Integrative Medicine 12(4): 1-3.
(2014) Pritzker, S.E. Standardization and Its Discontents: Translation, Tension, and The Life of Language in Contemporary Chinese Medicine.East Asian Science and Technology Studies 8: 25-42.
(2013) Pritzker, S.E., M. Katz, & K.K. Hui. Person-Centered Medicine at The Intersection of East and West. European Journal of Person-Centered Medicine1(1): 209-215.
(2012) Pritzker, S.E. Translating the Essence of Healing: Inscription and Interdiscursivity in U.S. Translations of Chinese Medicine. Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series:Themes in Translation Studies11(2012): 151-166.
(2012) Pritzker, S.E. & K.K. Hui. Building an Evidence-base for TCM and Integrative East-West medicine: A Review of Recent Developments in Innovative Research Design. Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, 2(3): 158-163.
(2012) Pritzker, S.E.Theorizing Mind In Chinese Language and Medicine. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 36(4): 55-57.
(2012) Pritzker, S.E. Living Translation in U.S. Chinese Medicine. Language in Society. 41(3): 343-364. Available here
(2011) Pritzker, S.E. The Part of Me that Wants to Grab: Embodied Experience and LivingTranslation in U.S. Chinese Medical Education. Ethos 39(3): 395-413. [winner of the 2010 Condon Prize]
(2007) Pritzker, S.E.Thinking Hearts, Feeling Brains: Metaphor, Culture, and The Self in Chinese Narratives of Depression. Metaphor and Symbol 22(3): 251-274.
(2007) Phillips, M.R., Q.J. Shen, X.H. Liu, S. Pritzker, D. Streiner, K. Conner & G.H. Yang. Assessing Depressive Symptoms in Persons Who Die of Suicide in Mainland China. Journal of Affective Disorders98: 73-82.
(2007) Hui, K.K. & Pritzker, S.E.Terminology Standardization in Chinese Medicine: The Perspective from UCLA Center for East-West Medicine (parts I and II). Chinese Journal of Integrated Medicine13(1): 1-5 & 13(2): 152-155.
(2005) Bing, Y. & Pritzker, S.E.Investigation on Bei die.Chinese Journal of Medical History (Zhonghua Yishi Zazhi) 35(4): 206-208 [in Chinese].
(2004) Pritzker, S.E. & Bing, Y. The Apologetic Heart: Shame, Depression, and Bei Die in Chinese Culture and Medicine. Journal of Chinese Medicine 76: 9-14.
Book Sections
(In Press) Perrino, S. & Pritzker, S.E.Language and Intimate Relations. In K. Hall and E. Barrett (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(In Press) Ho, E. Y., Leung, G., Chi, H.-L., Huang, S., Zhang, H., Ting, I., Chan, D., Chen, Y., Pritzker, S.,Hsieh, E., & Seligman, H. K. Integrative Medicine Focus Groups as a Source of Patient Agency and Social Change. In M. Dutta and D. Zapata (Eds.). Communicating for Social Change: Intersection of Theory and Praxis. Singapore: Palgrave-McMillan.
(In Press) Pritzker, S.E. Translating Chinese Medicine in the West. In Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker, Eds. Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine. Oxford: Rutledge.
(2017) Pritzker, S.E. Translating Chinese Medicine: History, Theory, Practice. In Chris Shei and Zhaoming Gao, Eds. Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation. Oxford: Routledge.
(2016) Pritzker, S.E., Hui, E.K.W, Ochs, S., & Hui, K.K. Aging and Mental Health from an Integrative East-West Perspective. In Helen Lavretsky, Martha Sajatovic, and Charles F. Reynolds III, Eds. Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Interventions in Mental Health and Aging. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
(2013) Pritzker, S.E. Textuality and truth in U.S. Chinese medicine education (short vignette). In T.J. Hinrichs and Linda Barnes, Eds. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, p. 318.
(2012) Pritzker, S.E. Standardization and its discontents: Four snapshots in the life of language in Chinese medicine (book chapter). In Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, Eds. Authenticity, Best Practice, and the Evidence Mosaic:Integrating East Asian Medicines into Contemporary Healthcare, pp. 75-88.
(2012) Pritzker, S.E. Transforming Self, world, medicine: The trend toward spiritualization inU.S. Chinese medicine (short vignette). In Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, Eds. Authenticity, Best Practice, and the Evidence Mosaic: Integrating East Asian Medicines into Contemporary Healthcare, p. 203.