Healing Powers and Modernity
in Asian Societies: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science
Edited by Linda H. Connor
and Geoffrey Samuel
Description
The
subject of this book is the state of healing practices in contemporary Asian
societies. In what ways is indigenous healing being reconstituted through processes
of transnational modernity? How is the praxis of healing being transformed by
the politics of health within modern nation-states and by the processes of commodification
of both healers and their therapies? What is the significance of indigenous
healing in the construction of new discourses of cultural identity and new nationalisms?
How do patients in Asian societies engage with the plurality of healing practices
that are themselves shaped by wider relations of power? How is modernity experienced
through the embodied senses and the suffering body?
These are large and complex
questions, especially since South, Southeast and East Asian societies present
many different facets of the encounter between “local,” “indigenous”
or “traditional” healing, and modernity. In this book we explore the
present state of a range of healing practices in their Asian locales. The authors,
all of whom are anthropologists with extensive research experience in Asian
societies, acknowledge the multiple healing resources available to patients
in these societies, while emphasizing the ways in which the state legitimizes
and transforms certain healing systems, and thus how institutional power relations
inflect healing in local contexts, while never totally defining it.
Contents
Introduction
Healing Powers in Contemporary
Asia Linda H. Connor
Part One: Healing in the
Modern State: Korea, Malaysia, and India
The Cultural Politics of
“Superstition” in the Korean Shaman World: Modernity Constructs its
Other Laurel Kendall
Tradition and Change in
Malay Healing Carol Laderman
Modernity and the Midwife:
Contestations Over a Subaltern Figure, South India Kalpana Ram
The Political Ecology of
Health in India: Indigestion as Sign and Symptom of Defective Modernization
Mark Nichter
Part Two: Healing on the
Margins: Malaysia, Indonesia, and China
Engaging the Spirits of
Modernity: The Temiars Marina Roseman
Presence, Efficacy, and
Politics in Healing among the Iban of Sarawak Amanda Harris
Sorcery and Science as Competing
Models of Explanation in a Sasak village Cynthia L. Hunter
Medicines and Modernities
in Socialist China: Medical Pluralism, the State, and Naxi Identities in the
Lijiang Basin Sydney D. White
Part Three: Healing, Power
and Identity in Tibetan Societies
Tibetan Medicine at the
Crossroads: Radical Modernity and the Social Organization of Traditional Medicine
in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China Craig R. Janes
Particularizing Modernity:
Tibetan Medical Theorizing of WomenÕs Health in Lhasa, Tibet Vincanne Adams
Tibetan Medicine in Contemporary
India: Theory and Practice Geoffrey Samuel
Publication Details
Healing Powers and Modernity:
Traditional Medicine, Shamanism and Science in Asian Societies. Edited by
Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel. Bergin and Garvey (Greenwood Publishing),
Westport, CT. Published in February 2001. (ISBN 0-89789-715-3)
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