Thailand Bodily practices and medical identities in southern Thailand

摘要

This book is a fine study of the conjunction between the creation of a medicalising state and a traditional medicine practised among the Muslim minority in southern Thailand. Assuming that modern medicine has already been epistemologically instituted as the state's machination in monitoring and scrutinising its subjects' bodies, Claudia Merli's starting point is at a time when biomedical practices have been gathering pace in Thailand's medical landscape since the 1960s. Family-planning and demographic statistics are thus addressed as a central issue of Thailand's bio-power, when 'the goal of demographic control passes from general family planning policies to the management of actual female bodies'(p. 61). She argues that the state's policies were well accepted among Thai docile citizens, 'the family planning programmes succeeded at the national level, while less so in the South (p. 24). The programmes encounter no resistance, except in a small corner of the Muslim minority in the southern part. There, traditional and indigenous medical practices are largely dominant, partly because they are the identity politics of their Malayness.