Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia

2. Learning Sasak Anatomy

2  Learning Sasak Anatomy In late February 1995, nearly every household in Pelocok had at least one person ill. In my household three of us were ill; I was one of them. The illness usually lasted more than a week and seemed ›ulike: fevers, loss of appetite, fatigue, and stomach pains. Everyone, I was told, was sick with the same thing: “Enyakitne pede doang” (The illness is just the same). Everyone said it was a penyakit biese—a usual illness.1 Nonetheless , people admitted that it was not normal for illness to be epidemic (te’rinduqan). I tried a number of times to get at a theory for the spreading of disease, but to no avail. Sitting one morning with Amaq Mol, both of us feeling under the weather, I tried one last time: Cameron: Why is everyone sick these days? Everyone is sick with the same thing. Amaq Mol: Yes. Everyone is sick now. It’s the same sickness everywhere . Cameron: Yes. It is the same sickness everywhere. How does the sickness go from one person to another? Amaq Mol: Yes. Everyone is sick now. It’s the same thing. Cameron: Yes. But how does it happen that illness goes from one body to another? Amaq Mol: Yes. Cameron: Everyone is sick with the same thing? Amaq Mol: Yes. Everyone is sick with the same thing now. It is the same sickness for everyone. Everyone is sick. Cameron: Does the illness walk from one body to another? Amaq Mol: Yes.
65  1. Sasaks distinguish between usual and unusual illness. I discuss this distinction further in chapter 5. remembering to live Cameron: How does it? Amaq Mol: It goes from one body to the next. It is the same thing. Cameron: Yes. What is the path the illness uses to go from one body to another? Amaq Mol: It walks from one body to another. Cameron: Yes, but how? How does illness go from one body to another? Amaq Mol: Yes. It is given by Allah. Do you want some more tea? This interaction reminds me of Evans-Pritchard’s frustration in trying to learn a person’s name among the Nuer (1969, 12–13). But whereas in Evans-Pritchard’s case, the Nuer deliberately kept knowledge deemed valuable from him, here I was asking the wrong questions based on my agenda, not theirs. Understandings of bodies and their susceptibilities to illness emerge in context based on perceptions of relevance ; they do not ‹t neatly into a description of “Sasak ethnomedicine ” or even a description of medical pluralism in Pelocok.
•  There is no Sasak version of Grey’s Anatomy lying around Pelocok. Nor is there a single widespread version of cultural knowledge about anatomy. People’s interest is not with anatomy, an intellectual understanding of the physical body and its operations. Rather, they are concerned with their own immediate physical state relative to their ideals of health. As we have seen, rural Sasaks generally ascribe “health” to the fat, tall, strong, virile, wealthy bodies of outsiders, mostly well-to-do townspeople. In comparison, they tend to consider their own bodies as sakit (Indon., ill) or at least kurang sehat (Indon., less than healthy). Sasaks are aware that their bodies are vulnerable. Their concern is pragmatic—they want to know what precautions and preventions they should take, not intellectualize about the mechanisms involved. This pragmatic and contextual interest is also re›ected in how they learn about anatomy. Like many people in the world, Sasaks learn anatomy by living, by listening to the admonishments of others, by engaging in conversations, and by watching the illnesses of others. To what extent does this manner of learning about the body yield a systematic , widely accepted understanding of what bodies consist of and how they operate? Persons’ particular constellations of knowledge do have family resemblances, which is hardly surprising given that Sasak
66  people tend to learn most within their family circles and most people in Pelocok are related in one way or another. Moreover, everyone in Pelocok has healing knowledge, and many are called regularly to identify or treat speci‹c illnesses even though they are not considered health experts. In a society where everyone is a potential healer, family resemblances in no way predict or limit the possible understandings of the body in Pelocok. Nonetheless, among the different types of experts, understandings differ in predictable ways. For example, a dukun...