The Power of Remainder: Politics and Poetics of Healing in Myanmar

In The Power of Remainder, Céline Coderey redefines how we understand health, healing, and marginality in Myanmar.Focusing on the Buddhist communities of Rakhine, a geopolitically peripheral state, she explores their rich and diverse "medical repertoire" ranging from divination and Buddhist prayers to herbal and alchemic medicines, biomedical care and astrological offerings, and argues that this repertoire reflects an intricate interplay of biological, social, cosmological, and political forces. Based on thirty months of fieldwork between 2004 and 2019, this ethnographic study reveals the interconnectedness between plurality, positionality, and efficacy.The necessity for diverse healing approaches is driven not only by the desire to live and thrive, but also by the categorizations and hierarchies imposed on medical practices, knowledge, and people.These categorizations-shaped by governance and nation-building-affect how healers deploy resources and how users access them, ultimately inf