Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City

Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City is an ethnographic examination of urban medicine and the hybrid medical practices and perceptions encountered in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Based on observations, interviews, and other data, Ferzacca not only illustrates the plurality of Javanese approaches to their own health, but also how this medical pluralism was nurtured during the Suharto regime by an Indonesian nationalist discourse on the health of modernity. Healing the Modern also explores how the contours of medical pluralism in this Javanese urban landscape are built from a particular architecture, or structure of experience that articulates Javanese notions of the self and identity. From these concerns, Healing the Modern spans interests in both medical anthropology and cultural psychology. It is a book that both the specialist and the generalist can appreciate.

This book will also be invaluable for readers interested in more specific areas of ethnography, such as literature and writing culture issues; phenomenological approaches in ethnography; the ethnography of Indonesia; or theoretical approaches relevant to urban ethnography and anthropology.

This book is part of the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.