- Title
- Healing knowledge, healing power: the agency of well-being among Iban communities, Sarawak
- Creator
- Harris, Amanda Dorothy
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 1998
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- The concern of this thesis is the articulation of several contexts of experience - illness and healing, history and the socio-economic and political forces underlying marginalisation in the lives of rural Iban people in the Pakan Sub-district of Sarawak. Examination of the healing context reveals some longhouse communities are experiencing an invigoration of racial identification that embraces an Ibanness with its roots in the past, a strengthening of alliances between community members and the reinforcement of boundaries distinguishing rural Iban people from racially and religiously defined others. Other communities are turning away from the practices of their forbears in constructing identities more in line with officially sanctioned notions of modernity. These processes are the result of historical, political and economic realities, and a growing disparity between longhouse communities that is related o uneven development in rural areas. Attending to the disparities in marginalisation between communities is essential to understanding how people experience illness, the strategies of diagnosis and treatment they pursue as well as ways in which healing practice and healing knowledge are both informed by and enter into people's negotiations of social relations outside the medical context, notably, the progression of rural Iban people into the lower ranks of an emerging class structure. The point of departure for much of the analysis is the phenomenology of being ill. Notions of personhood that inform conceptions of health and illness are discussed with particular attention to semengat. This analysis is location within disciplinary debates on Western anthropological representation of, in this case, a Southeast Asian 'other'. A critique is offered of decontextualised, overly systemised and reified anthropological representations in relation to the ethnography of Iban people and Iban healing, and this critique informs an analysis of diagnostic process and curative resort among Pakan longhouse residents. This material is also a response to a dearth of such research among rural people of Sarawak. In particular, the extent and basis of resort to non-biomedical therapies are addressed through an exploration of six examples of illness, themselves contextualised in a broader analysis of curative practices among longhouse residents. Pakan people's awareness of vulnerability and victimisation effected by historical, political and economic forces, also finds expression i transformations of local aetiology manifesting in illness causing agents beyond the scope of Iban medical knowledge. Similarly, notions of diminishing 'Iban power' emerge in assertions of decreasing healing power. Such transformations, however, as they are internalised and explicitly reinforced by Pakan people, are in tension with attempts to construct a modern and viable identity around Iban medical knowledge and practice. Particular attention is given to Iban women, whose experiences of development are in many ways distinct from those of men. The relationship of many longhouse women with the institutions of biomedicine, as well as other changes in women's lives, effect transformations in perceptions of self that augment gender inequality. The thesis concludes with an event that condenses and renders transparent relations of power between Iban healers, their communities and Iban representatives of state. Through various unscripted forms of resistance, Iban healers attempt to insert their practice into the agendas of those who claim to support rural communities. The limits to agency they experience as their attempts fail to transform prevailing structures of power is a poignant indicator of the lack of agency of rural Iban people in determining the general conditions of their lives and their future.
- Subject
- illness; healing; Iban communities; Sarawak; Malaysia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1312548
- Identifier
- uon:22426
- Rights
- Copyright 1998 Amanda Dorothy Harris
- Language
- eng
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