Healing Powers and Modernity Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies

Subjects:

• Anthropology » Cultural Anthropology
• Health/Medicine » Public Health
• Multicultural Studies » Asian Studies

Reviews:

• These compelling studies of local healers caught in global currents can stand on their own.
  —Philosophy East & West October 2006
• The book is an excellent introduction to the medical anthropology of the region. While acknowledging the dominance of biomedicine in modernist nation states in Asia, it also helps to show the power relations inherent in the operation of healing praxis. It is a highly readable book, with fieldwork located at the centre of the individual contributions....This essential reading for anyone interested in healing praxis and for those with a research interest in Asian societies.
  —Cambridge University Press 2003
• [i]ntriguing and electric.
  —The Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute March 2003
• I have always looked to anthropology to generate ideas of global relevance from the detailed description of local healing encounters. Healing Powers and Modernity does exactly this. The chapters are all well written by medical anthropologies working with societies in Southeast and East Asia. The editors, Linda Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, have done well to bring these diverse casestudies together into a coherent whole....This is an important and timely book. It is rich in case material detail but also contains enough anthropological reflection to demonstrate the global relevance of these accounts.
  —Social Science & Medicine 2003

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia by Linda H. Connor
• Healing in the Modern State: Korea, Malaysia, and India
• The Cultural Politics of "Superstition" in the Korean Shaman World: Modernity Constructs Its Other by Laurel Kendall
• Tradition and Change in Malay Healing by Carol Laderman
• Modernity and the Midwife: Contestations Over a Subaltern Figure, South India by Kalpana Ram
• The Political Ecology of Health in India: Indigestion as Sign and Symptom of Defective Modernization by Mark Nichter
• Healing on the Margins: Malaysia, Indonesia, and China
• Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: The Temiars by Marina Roseman
• Presence, Efficacy, and Politics in Healing Among the Iban of Sarawak by Amanda Harris
• Sorcery and Science as Competing Models of Explanation in a Sasak Village by Cynthia L. Hunter
• Medicines and Modernities in Socialist China: Medical Pluralism, the State, and Naxi Identities in the Lijiang Basin by Sydney D. White
• 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 by Craig R. Janes
• Partuclarizing Modernity: Tibetan Medical Theorizing of Women's Health in Lhasa, Tibet by Vincanne Adams
• Tibetan Medicine in Contemporary India: Theory and Practice by Geoffrey Samuel
• Glossary of Tibetoan Terms
• Index