Tradisi and Moderen, Village and State: Emergent Tensions in a Sasak Health Quest

Abstract

On Lombok island, in the province of West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, indigenous medicine and biomedicine coexist. Nevertheless, biomedicine, a product of modernity and the development of the state has been superimposed on village life along with other state institutions such as education. In this paper I analyse the processes involved in Sasak villagers' quest for health. Operating within various and sometimes overlapping social fields and conflicting discourses, villagers utilise both local indigenous practices as well as the Indonesian national health system in their quest. Because local or ordinary knowledge is a rich resource for interpretation, I describe the health quest through the participant individuals: family members, neighbours,. doctors and nursing personnel involved. The subjectivity of the individual participants contributes to the intricate unfolding of health seeking quests to expose the various tensions which emerge between tradition (trudisi [A) and modernity (moderen [A) and between state and village.

Are Allopathic and Holistic Medicine Incommensurable?

“…Despite Latour's objection, that we have never been modern [1], contemporary biomedicine is a solid proof of modernity, being at the same time a derivative and a constitutive element of the latter [2]. From a historical perspective, the shift from the Aristotelian to the Newtonian scientific paradigm that took place between the late 16th and the early 18th century gave birth to progresses in the natural, hard sciences and contributed to the emergence of modernity.…”