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Healing the whole: Questioning the boundaries between medicine and religion in Rakhine, Western Myanmar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2020

Céline Coderey
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Abstract

Based on fieldwork conducted among the Buddhist population living in Rakhine State, Myanmar, between 2005 and 2011, this article elucidates how people deal with health and illness and related uncertainties by relying on a multiplicity of conceptions and practices associated with Buddhism, astrology, spirit cults, as well as indigenous and Western medicine. This article unpacks this plurality to show how different components contribute to the healing process in complementary and yet hierarchical ways which hold to a nexus of political, social, medical, economic, cosmological, biological, and environmental factors. It also questions the boundaries between the religious and medical, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, worldly and otherworldly, and natural and supernatural.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1-2 , June 2020 , pp. 49 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2020

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful comments and criticisms.

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34 See also Spiro, Buddhism and society, pp. 155–6.

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39 Spiro, Buddhism and society.

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49 A detailed description of diviners and astrologers can be found in Coderey, ‘Les maîtres du “reste”’.

50 Ibid., pp. 172–4.

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