Browsing by Subject "Southeast Asia"
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    Ghosts of the new city
    (University of Hawaii Press, 2014, 2024-01-02) Andrew Alan Johnson
    Chiang Mai (literally, “new city”) suffered badly in the 1997 Asian financial crisis as the Northern Thai real estate bubble collapsed along with the Thai baht, crushing dreams of a renaissance of Northern prosperity. Years later, the ruins of the excesses of the 1990s still stain the skyline. In Ghosts of the New City, Andrew Alan Johnson shows how the trauma of the crash, brought back vividly by the political crisis of 2006, haunts efforts to remake the city. For many Chiang Mai residents, new developments harbor the seeds of the crash, which manifest themselves in anxious stories of ghosts and criminals who conceal themselves behind the city’s progressive veneer. Hopes for rebirth and fears of decline have their roots in Thai conceptions of progress, which draw from Buddhist and animist ideas of power and sacrality. Cities, Johnson argues, were centers where the charismatic power of kings and animist spirits were grounded; these entities assured progress by imbuing the space with sacred power that would avert disaster. Johnson traces such magico-religious conceptions of potency and space from historical records through present-day popular religious practice and draws parallels between these and secular attempts at urban revitalization. Through a detailed ethnography of the contested ways in which academics, urban activists, spirit mediums, and architects seek to revitalize the flagging economy and infrastructure of Chiang Mai, Johnson finds that alongside the hope for progress there exists a discourse about urban ghosts, deadly construction sites, and the lurking anxiety of another possible crash, a discourse that calls into question history’s upward trajectory. In this way, Ghosts of the New City draws new connections between urban history and popular religion that have implications far beyond Southeast Asia.
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    Translating the Body
    (National University of Singapore Press, 2024-01-02) Hans Pols ; Claudia Michele Thompson
    Until recently, receiving a European or North American-style medical education in Southeast Asia was a profoundly transformative experience, as western conceptions of the body differed significantly from indigenous knowledge and explanatory frameworks. Further, European and North American conceptions of the human body had to be translated into local languages and related to vernacular views of health, disease, and healing. This process of medical translation developed in the context of colonialism, which sought to remake colonized societies in a multitude of ways. The contributors to this volume chart and analyze the organization of western medical education in Southeast Asia, public health education campaigns in the region, and the ways in which practitioners of what came to be conceived of as “traditional medicine” in many Southeast Asian countries organized themselves in response. This volume uses “translating the body” as shorthand to call attention to the processes through which medical ideas, practices, and epistemologies are formulated in pedagogical contexts, processes involving both interpretation and transmission. Translation here is a linguistic but also a cultural operation, and in approaching medical education, the book follows recent work in translation studies that underscores the translation not merely of words but of cultures.