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111 Chapter 4 Dangerous Language THE POEM “WHAT’S WRITTEN ON THE BODY” by the physician Peter Pereira transports us to a scene of medical practice, which over the past couple of centuries has increasingly become a primary site for communication with the dying. The verse alerts us to the way a prognosis can be a verdict of life or death. It also offers an opening for thinking through the different genres of language used to address the dying on the part of medicine and on the part of Southeast Asian laypersons and healing practitioners. Both linguistic registers are powerful in their effects, but a medical prognosis and a message to the spirits printed on the skin exercise power in different ways. While it might seem that one is a technical language of matter, and the other a magical language of spirit, each of these languages is informed by a distinctive understanding of the relationship between matter and spirit.These alternate understandings offer different possibilities for confronting death. Lt. Somsy spoke once about the chom mon, or mantras, which had kept him alive during his time as a soldier in the Royal Lao Army from the 1950s to the early 1970s. He had walked for a month to reach the achan, or teacher, who taught him to repeat a stream of sacred words. “Instead of saying in order the Pali language you say it in reverse to make it magic, to protect the bullet from going through your skin.” Before imparting the words, the achan tested his bravery, having him jump in a pit of sharpened bamboo and grab a thorny vine that pierced his skin to the bone. The achan healed the wounds by speaking magic syllables, blowing into his hand, and then touching the wounds. Minutes later Lt. Somsy began to speak unprompted of another memory, a memory of near death fromwhich these same chom monhad protectedhim, a memory of another pit, other barbs, a hole in the ground, covered with barbed wire, where he was held captive in a Pathet Lao prison camp. Some nights he was taken blindfolded into the jungle. They told me that theywas going tokill me.Theyhave spade and shovel for me so that I would dig my own grave. They told me to dig the grave, and I didn’t. They hit me. Then they took me back and put me in the same underground cell. . . . They used the butt of the gun, and hit on the knee. It was swollen. . . . The man wouldn’t give me any medicine. Maybe because I have the magic power that I have learned, or maybe because I have done good deeds, the power has protected me. The swelling has gone by itself. Later he segued into an account of his escape from yet another pit in another prison camp, this time Vietnamese. He sketched a diagram of the camp on a scrap of notepaper, the guard tower, the path of the patrols, the route he had crawled on a rainy night after he and his cellmates had managed to unravel a little of the barbed wire over the pit. “I was the first who got out and after me I saw two more people, there’s three of us that got out. I didn’t know if they were safe or not because then they saw and they fired on us. . . . I don’t know if those two were alive or if they escaped.” Later on that afternoon Lt. Somsy talked about the dreams of combat that our meetings often provoked. Our conversation had the power to call back old events, and invite new ones, toleave nightmares in itswake. Words,whether the chom monhe recited or the war stories he recounted, were neither neutral nor inert: they could be protective , or they couldbe risky, even injurious. If this is true for thewords of ethnographic encounters, it is no less true for the words of medical interactions. Confessing Death In June 1999, while I was writing a report on the initial fieldwork that inspired this book, I spent the last two weeks of my father’s life at his house in Massachusetts. At ninety-two he was suffering from cancer and congestive heart failure, and since I’d last seen him he had grown progressively weaker. He no longer left the house to tend his garden and bees, and he had given away his companion of many years, a horse named Moses. My sister and I...

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