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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.1 (2025): 162–195; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.01.05
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Asia-European Exchanges Mediated through Buddhism, Buddhism and Medicine: New Perspectives)
Beyond ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Medicine’: State Policies and Medical Pluralism in Contemporary Rakhine (Myanmar)
Céline CODEREY
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
ccoderey@hawaii.edu
Abstract: This paper explores how Buddhist communities in contemporary Rakhine State, Myanmar, engage with health and illness through a diverse range of beliefs and practices. Previous scholarship has often overlooked this ‘therapeutic field’, primarily because health-related beliefs and practices have been artificially separated into distinct categories—either as religious phenomena or medical matters. This division, rooted in etic (outsider) perspectives, has hindered a comprehensive understanding of local therapeutic systems.
In contrast, I argue that the emic (insider) categories used by Rakhine people—particularly their distinctions between ‘Buddhism’ and ‘medicine’—hold both ethnographic and analytic value. These categories reveal the cultural, social, and political processes that shape the positioning and perceived legitimacy of different practices within the therapeutic field, as well as the hierarchical and complementary relationships between them.
I further demonstrate that the state has played a key role in shaping this therapeutic landscape by regulating and formalising Buddhism and medicine. These processes not only elevated these two categories above others but also redefined their content and function, restricting their therapeutic scope and altering their relationship with other healing traditions. Ultimately, I argue that the ongoing coexistence of formal categories (Buddhism and medicine) alongside the persistent hybridity of health-related practices contributes to therapeutic efficacy in ways that reproduce existing political power dynamics.
Keywords: Buddhism, medicine, pluralism, state policies, categories
About the Author: Céline Coderey is a socio-cultural anthropologist, Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Associate Researcher at the National University of Singapore. Her field of expertise spans from medical anthropology and anthropology of the body to anthropology of religion, but also to questions of identity in relation to performing arts, heritage making and temporalities. Her research is mainly focused on Myanmar and neighboring Southeast Asian countries, and on the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. Her work has been published in Medical Anthropology, Modern Asian Studies, Asian Medicine, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and she is the author of the upcoming book The Power of Remainder: Politics and Poetics of Healing in Myanmar (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2026). Her teaching includes the courses Biomedicine and Singapore society, Time and Life, Skin, The Sea is Us, Medical Anthropology, Pacific Island Cultures, Society and Environment, and Culture and Health.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
