Agenda

Immortal medicine: Understanding the resilience of alchemic practice in the context of nation building in Myanmar

Guest Lecturer 
Dr Celine Coderey (National University of Singapore)

Please register at this Zoom Link

Abstract
After providing some background on Burmese medicine and its geo-political specificities, Dr Coderey’s lecture will focus on alchemic medicine and the marginal (but yet powerful) position this practice occupies within Myanmar’s larger medical landscape. The Burmese central government has institutionalized traditional medicine as part of its nation building project, placing alchemy at the margins of the formal health system. This practice, however, remains very much alive.
Dr Coderey’s presentation explores the resilience of alchemic medicine in Myanmar by unraveling the relationship between this traditional practice and the social and political space within which it operates. It will show how a space for alchemic medicine's resilience is negotiated in the grey areas that result from the medical sector’s weak regulatory system, and from the gaps left by biomedicine. The lecture will demonstrate that the marginalization of alchemic practice has actually invested it with new political meanings that help its practitioners navigate an increasingly hostile space.

Céline Coderey is a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute and Lecturer at Tembusu College, National University of Singapore. Working at the crossroads of medical and religion anthropology, she explores the diversity of medical and healing practices in contemporary Myanmar. In her previous research she has looked at the institutionalization of traditional medicine, the governance and circulation of medical products, (the obstacles to) the accessibility of biomedical health care services, notably in the sector of HIV and mental health, practices of divination and alchemy. Her current project focuses on temporality, memory and resilience in the context of displacement in Rakhine State. She also work as a consultant and psychosocial support provider for organizations operating in the Rakhine conflict. She has recently published Circulation and governance of Asian medicines with Routledge (2019).

This conference is part of Geopolitics of Southeast Asia Seminar Series 
Course of Geopolitics of Southeast Asia, Prof. Giuseppe Bolotta
(B.A. program in “Languages, Cultures, and Societies of Asia and Mediterranean Africa”, South-East Asia Curriculum)