| This dissertation examines how rural public health became politically vital at key moments of national transition from the time of the Netherlands Indies colony in the 1930s to the present post-Suharto moment in Indonesia, bringing about complex changes in local forms of knowledge, authority, and difference in Javanese villages. The study complicates scholarly notions of "colonial medicine" by showing how rural hygiene not only served Dutch moral claims to the philanthropic care of colonized populations, but also arose out of transnational Rockefeller Foundation hookworm prevention projects, contributed to the growing internationalism of public health in the interwar period that was critical of colonialism, and inspired the nation building projects of Indonesian doctors and anti-colonial nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s. Critical to the dissertation is an analysis of the rise of Suharto's New Order state in the aftermath of the 1965-66 anti-communist massacres, during which time elite female family planning labor became positively refigured as part of a "revolutionary struggle" to lower national birthrates. Drawing on a year of ethnography and memory work in Karang Wetan, a former Rockefeller Foundation model village in rural Banyumas, Central Java the dissertation shows how public health tapped into local relations of patronage, modes of public performance, and ideas about development temporality as supplements to power. How people talked about toilets, microscopes, film projectors, and statistics; recalled odors, sensory pleasures, laughter, deference, and shame; and remembered elite health workers, Dutch schoolboys, Japanese soldiers, and revolutionary heroes forms the basis of this study's enriched vision of the past and the many domains of life touched by public health. These memories---expressed through nostalgia, regret, hesitation, and silence---also show something larger about how Javanese conceive of time, history, and the future in the present, post-Suharto period. This study provides critical insight into how public health preventive education techniques, even within "model" health villages, create forms of stratified medicalization that privilege elite authority and access to health care and exclude poorer villagers, who may be marginalized by the very development mechanisms intended to protect their lives. |
