Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory)

Sasaks, a people of the Indonesian archipelago, cope with one of the country's worst health records by employing various medical traditions, including their own secret ethnomedical knowledge. But anxiety, in the presence and absence of illness, profoundly shapes the ways Sasaks use healing and knowledge. Hay addresses complex questions regarding cultural models, agency, and other relationships to conclude that the ethnomedical knowledge they use to cope with their illnesses ironically inhibits improvements in their health care. M. Cameron Hay is a NSF Advance Fellow and an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the UCLA Center for Culture and Health. Laughter rings throughout Sasak compounds on Lombok, the island immediately east of Bali. Yet as a place with one of the worst health records in Indonesia, illness and death are also constant threats. How can this paradox exist? Anthropologist M. Cameron Hay argues that Sasaks cope by selectively accessing the medical knowledge of various traditions, including their own secret ethnomedical knowledge. Her conclusion discusses the tragic irony that the ethnomedical knowledge which rural Sasaks use to cope with their vulnerabilities and illnesses inhibits improvements in their health care. Remembering to Live provides compelling narratives and vivi photographs to engage the reader in the lives and concerns of a unique and relatively unknown people.

An ethnographic exploration of health, illness, and healing among a poor, rural Indonesian people

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. . . a major contribution to anthropological studies of health and ethnographies of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. [Hay's] engaging style, descriptive luminosity, and theoretical reach make this appropriate for undergraduate and advanced audiences.