Remembering to live: Coping with health concerns on Lombok (Indonesia)

The dissertation is about Sasak ethnomedicine in a pluralistic medical setting and argues that the organization of medical knowledge has profound consequences for people's health. The Sasak people live on Lombok, an island with the dubious distinction of having a population with among the poorest health records in Indonesia. Within Lombok, health care is the gravest problem for Sasaks who live outside Lombok's towns and cities. The dissertation is based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Sasak peasants in a rural hamlet.; Rural Sasaks have access to biomedical care and utilize it to a limited extent, but it is ethnomedical knowledge that they rely on to prevent and heal illnesses. Ethnomedical knowledge is secret and is distributed in such a way that everyone is a potential healer. These characteristics shape the ways body, person, and community are understood, and illnesses are prevented, named, and treated. Sasak organization of ethnomedical knowledge motivates rural Sasaks to try almost anything, and usually multiple things at once, to prevent or treat an illness.; The dissertation is divided into four sections. The first section introduces the socioeconomic conditions of rural Sasak life and the outlines the ways knowledge is distributed by the different medical traditions. The second section examines how rural Sasaks use their knowledge of bodies and prevention to cope with their health concerns in the absence of actual illness. It argues that how people experience vulnerabilities and act to prevent illness has a profound influence on how they cope with illness in its presence. The third section examines the processes of how Sasaks go about naming illnesses and legitimating treatments; it highlights how the dispersion of ethnomedical healing knowledge encourages multiple illness names and treatments, and complicates resort to biomedicine. The final section reveals how Sasaks cope with and explain death, which all too frequently marks the end of their illnesses. The conclusion is a discussion of the tragic irony that the ethnomedical knowledge which enables rural Sasaks to cope with experiences of vulnerability and illness inhibits improvements in their health care.