Medicine at the margins: colonial entanglements, knowledge hybridization, and medical identity in the Ryukyu Islands

This article explores the history of medicine in the Ryukyu Islands from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, positioning the archipelago within intersecting Chinese, Japanese and Western imperial orders. It argues that Ryukyuan medicine evolved as a hybrid system shaped by colonial marginality and transnational exchange. Through encounters with Chinese pharmacology, Japanese Kampō and local herbal traditions, practitioners localized and reconfigured external knowledge, producing therapeutic forms that fused textual, ritual and empirical elements. Medicine thus functioned both as a tool of colonial governance and as a means of asserting cultural identity and resistance. Comparative references to Taiwan, Korea and Pacific societies reveal how peripheral communities transformed medicine into a site of adaptation and creativity. The study contributes to medical anthropology and global health history by highlighting hybridity, localization and identity formation under asymmetrical power relations.