Translating the Body

Abstract

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.