Global Movements, Local Concerns

Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia

Bibliographic Data

ID6087007
AuthorsLaurence Monnais (0000-0001-9242-2056), Harold J Cook (0000-0001-5686-4957)
Year2013
Volume28
Issue2
Pages364
Publication date2013-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0217-9520 • E-ISSN: 1793-2858
PublisherISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute (PUBLISHER • SG)
DOI10.1355/sj28-2j
OpenAlexW1966484734
LanguageEN
Citations received9

The development of medicine in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries has not been a simple imposition of European scientific medicine, but a complex and negotiated process that drew on Southeast Asian health experts, local medical traditions, and changing national and popular expectations. The contributors to this volume show how the practices of health in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries were mediated by local medical traditions, colonial interests, governments and policies, international interventions, and by a wide range of health agents and intermediaries. Their findings call into question many of the claims based on medicalisation and biopolitics that treat change as a process of rupture. While governments, both colonial and national, instituted policies that affected large numbers of people, much health care remained rooted in a more interactive and locally-mediated experience, in which tradition, adaptation and hybridisation is as important as innovation and conflict. Semi-subaltern Western-trained doctors and varied traditional healers, many of them women, were among the cultural brokers involved in the building of healthcare systems, and helped circulate mixed practices and ideas about medicine and health even as they found their place in new professional and social hierarchies in an era of globalisation

Ethnology · Geography · Political science · Southeast asia · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History

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