Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City (Carolina Academic Press Medical Anthropology Series)

"Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City is an ethnographic examination of hybrid health practices and perceptions encountered in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Based on observations, interviews, and other data Healing the Modern illustrates Javanese approaches to their own health and the health of modernity that form a pluralistic urban medicine shaped by a dominant motif in a Javanese structure of experience, pangalaman. Urban medicine and medical pluralism are actualized by Javanese articulations of self as winds and flows circulating in a culturally experienced phenomenal world, or labyrinth of coincidences and possibilities which should not be blocked or closed off, or resolved in any way."

"Healing the Modern renders portraits of Javanese lives in a new and different manner. Rather than the conventional approach in ethnographic accounts of Javanese that has often portrayed Javanese selves as characters writ large scripted in a sociological drama with a predetermined story line concerning rank and order, Healing the Modern strives to disrupt the stereotypes of prototypical Javanese selves through an analysis of self produced through a layering of sense, sentiment, and history situated in the conditions, the contingencies, and disjunctions of everyday life in this Javanese city."--Jacket.