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- Merli, Claudia
(författare)
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Bodily Practices and Medical Identities in Southern Thailand
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study explores contemporary practices concerning women’s and children’s bodies, with a special focus on postpartum practices, the treatment of the afterbirth and its cosmological dimensions, and male and female circumcision. At the intersection between traditional midwifery and modern medicine, Muslim women cross the boundaries between different cosmologies and medical systems. At the borders to Malaysia, the Muslim minority in Thailand upholds postpartum practices which have been abandoned by the Thai Buddhists in the region, making of the body a contested site of powers and identities. Traditional midwives are pressured to limit their practices to rituals and massage. The increasing use of medical technologies in the form of Caesarean section and modern contraceptives are perceived as leading to changes in the local ethnophysiology of female bodies. The fluidity once characterising pre- and postpartum bodily states, has turned into an infertile rigidity exemplified by metaphors of a hardened body. In official discourse a sharp line is drawn between outdated tradition and medical modernity, at the same time as ethnic-religious borders between Malay Muslims and Thai Buddhists are erased with the disappearance of old practices and the emergence of new Muslim identities and rituals. Prodigious events and pregnancy losses led in the past to the formation of spirit cults managed by female mediums and represented a means of communication between Muslim and Buddhist lifeworlds. As these events vanish under medical scrutiny and intervention on the one hand, and a modernist reading of Islam on the other hand, local ethnophysiological conceptions are lost. Individual and social bodies are put under the medical dressage of biopolitics and a discourse on the Muslim minority is created to serve aims of internal colonialism.
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- Merli, Claudia
(författare)
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Female and male circumcisions in Satun: : private and public arenas in Muslim Southern Thailand. 23rd ASEASUK conference – St. Anthony’s College Oxford University, 15-17 September 2006.
- 2006
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- April is the month traditionally associated in Islam with circumcision. In Satun province the bidan (traditional midwife) and tok mudeng (male circumciser) were the people performing the operation on, girls and boys respectively. Both rituals were usually performed at home. Nowadays, while the first is still kept very private for the second a new public form is organized by the central mosque, during which medical personnel in front of a wide audience circumcise up to 100 boys aged 7-12. However, many families still prefer the private form also for boys. This paper aims at comparing the different traditions and how the new male circumcision presents a combination of medical technologies, bureaucracy and theatre, staging different kinds of powers on the body to a degree hardly seen before. While traditionally only males were allowed to be present at a male circumcision and only females at a female one, the public male circumcision crosses this hiatus, opening up male nudity and body to female scrutiny. The intersection of medicine and religion in the three different situations opens to considerations of how the politics involved exert their power on individual bodies.
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