Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Steven Ferzacca, Bryn Mawr College
Chair: Leslie K. Dwyer, Princeton University
These papers explore medicine, health, and modernity in Java, Indonesia. Perspectives on modernity, Indonesian and otherwise, as a particular kind of historical condition, are nearly always concerned with the ironies of becoming and being modern. The irony of modernity is often expressed, if not experienced, in terms of health. This panel of papers based on ethnographic research in Java examines medical practices and expressive forms for which a medical poetics provides symbolic resources as indices of Indonesian concerns with modern hopes and fears.
Political discourses current during the 1997 national election are organized by themes in mental health that traverse a classic language of Javanese psychologies and an emergent psychcology of modernism. Religious identity, particularly the revitalization of a modern Islam, is explored as a construct that is reworked and expressed in the context of biomedical practices related to prenatal and childbirth care. Clinical encounters with bioscience and its attendant technologies and protocols familiar to a global modernity are considered in the context of Javanese localities of therapy that course through scientific imaginaries and cultures of the clinic. The hybrid medical practices observed in an urban neighborhood mark a heightened anxiety with tradition and the authentic in the context of modern urban life. Islamic treatment centers for drug-addicted youth are considered as health care provisions that are symptomatic of a modernizing society, and serve as points of mediation in commentaries on Indonesian social life and youth culture. Finally, the growth of "the psychological" as a hybrid collection of ideologies and experiences is explored as opportunities for both constructing new individual identities, and for appropriation by the state as a mechanism of marginalization and control.
Byron Good, Harvard University
While studying psychopathology and mental health care in Yogyakarta amidst the campaigns for the 1997 national election, it was difficult to ignore the ubiquity of themes of order and chaos, stability and violence, that cross-cut diverse rhetorics and discourses. An old man in a village outside Yogya sold his land to the government and began going periodically crazy, becoming violent, threatening, and destructive. In a tragic conclusion, his fellow villagers attempted to subdue him, beat him up, and killed him. News accounts and personal stories described him as ngamuk, using a classic Malay term that was the source of fascination in colonial psychiatry. The months prior to the general election saw significant episodes of political, religious, and ethnic violence, and the formal campaigning included massive street demonstrations and scattered violence. These events were reported widely in the media, along with a barrage of essays speculating about the social, economic, and psychological sources of disorder. The term ngamuk was commonly used in the reports of public disorder. Based on ethnographic field research and analysis of media accounts, this paper explores the flow of the language of psychology and psychopathology into political discourse and the presence of political language in accounts of madness. The paper reflects on social theory relevant to analyzing such data, concluding that discourses from family psychology and psychopathology serve to naturalize political discourses of modernity and the New Order.
Leslie K. Dwyer, Princeton University
This paper explores the articulations between biomedicine and the recent revitalization of Islam in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, asking how Muslim and medical "modernities" are being defined and contested by women seeking prenatal and childbirth care. To understand the complex conjunctions of Islamic piety, political power, and medical practice occurring in contemporary Indonesia, it focuses on the experiences of patients and doctors at Rumah Sakit Bersalin Aisyiyah, the childbirth hospital run by Indonesia’s largest modernist Muslim organization. How, I ask, do people construct themselves as "modern Muslims" through their interactions with biomedicine? How are discourses of power and piety being expressed and reworked through the body? What kind of cultural and political relations are being created by Muslims in healthcare settings? How are issues of Islamic faith and scientific rationality addressed as women face health problems during their pregnancies? And how do Muslims engage with state discourses of technology, gender, modernity, and religious belief in their medical interactions? Arguing for an approach to "modernity" grounded in bodily experience, this paper asks how a focus on medical experience might bring to light crucial aspects of the processes of social change and religious revitalization occurring in Indonesia today.
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Harvard University
The scientific imaginary—the possibilities presented by new biotechnologies and therapeutic protocols—has generated modest changes in the culture of clinical practice among pediatricians in Yokyakarta who treat children suffering from leukemia. As clinicians seek molecular explanations for disease processes, resistance and response to treatment protocols, they are challenged to communicate to parents of afflicted children the chances of new protocols to bring about disease-free states. In this presentation, we explore the following questions, drawing on examples from the hematology/oncology unit of the teaching hospital of the Faculty of Medicine, Gadjah Mada University, and from the research activities of physician-scientists who carry out studies of leukemia and dengue at the Institute for Biotechnology, UGM. How are local cultures of clinical practice influenced by advances in the biosciences and biotechnology? How does the global cultural traffic of high technology medicine, via molecular images of disease processes and therapeutic protocols, transform clinical communication between physicians and parents of patients? How does research medicine capture the imagination of young clinicians and energize the search for molecular explanations for disease processes and resistance to therapeutics? What is the relationship between the search for molecular explanatory models and the social and economic context in which clinicians treat patients? Linkages between clinical culture and molecular research on childhood leukemia and dengue hemorrhagic fever currently conducted by physician-scientists at the Institute for Biotechnology, UGM, will be explored.
Steve Ferzacca, Bryn Mawr College
The Javanese maxim of modernity, masih Jawa asli, or still authentically Javanese, marks a fleeting past that many seem intent on discovering, recreating, inheriting, passing on, and holding onto. This paper outlines ways in which residents of a neighborhood (kampung) in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia encounter the asli in the context of medical practice and perception. A modern malaise linked to the contingencies and disjunctions of city life calls attentions to the natural histories of bodies and the various ways bodies are reproduced (and produced). Disease and health are seen as symptoms of social and cultural transformations in contemporary Indonesia. The hybrid medical practices I observed mark a heightened anxiety with regards to tradition and the authentic in the context of modern urban life. Disease, health, and medicine for residents of this kampung represent lived experiences of a Janus-faced modernity that simultaneously encompasses concerns with the past and the future in the emergent present. The consequence is a hybridity that is virtual with asli as a specter of the modern and the trace of a passage through time within a particular social and cultural space. As Javanese bodies, Javanese selves tap the copious flows and winds that saturate their existence, so go bodies and selves into a plurality of healthcare practices and perceptions.
Subandi, Gadjah Mada University
A growing problem of drug addiction is one of the negative consequences of development and modernization in Indonesia. The number of young people who are addicted has increased sharply in the past ten years, particularly among the youth of high socio-economic status in major cities. However, addiction is also increasing among the children and youth of the urban poor, among street children, and even among the young in village Indonesia. Evidence of these problems has led to widespread speculation in the media and among government experts and intellectuals about the corrosive effects of modernization on the Indonesian family, on social values, and on the health of Indonesian society.
While a variety of government agencies have been active in efforts for drug prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation, Islamic healing centers have been among the most active and successful in drug treatment. Many pesantren in Java have established formal or informal programs for treating and rehabilitating young people addicted to drugs. Especially well known are a set of inabah or in-patient treatment centers associated with the Pesantren Suryalaya of the Sufi order Qodiriyah Naqsyabandiyah. This paper will describe the diverse Islamic treatment of programs, with a special focus on Suryalaya, and will analyze Islamic commentaries on modernity and social problems of Indonesian youth that arise in the context of such programs.
Kevin Browne, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Wherever it emerges, the "psychological" has a particular history and specific practices and ideologies relevant to various matrices of power. In contemporary Java there is a growing "incitement to discourse" about things "psychological." Evident in the emergence of professional psychology, in media discussions on stress, violence and the ambivalence of "modernization," in the individualization and pathologization of quotidian struggles, and in everyday discourse, the "psychological" provides opportunities for both constructing new individual identities, and for appropriation by the state as a mechanism of marginalization and control.
This paper explores "the psychological" as a landscape of desire and violence, a hybrid collection of ideologies and experiences, of Javanese "psychologies," which reflect and create many of the ironies of "modernity" in contemporary Java. The possibilities which the "psychological" makes available, for transformation and control, are enacted in medical and healing settings, in the anxieties of families dealing with mental illness, in neighborhood conversations, and in state and media discourses. This paper explores some of the poetics of the "psychological" as it is currently experienced in Central Java.