Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: I n the growing scholarship on international health in the twentieth century, Indonesia has received relatively little attention, given the size of its population (roughly 260 million people) and its impressive development trajectory.Vivek Neelakantan's new book, focusing on the public health politics of Indonesia between 1945 and 1967, shows that the Indonesian case is valuable for sharpening our understanding of how international health and development institutions functioned in newly decolonized states under the geopolitical conditions of the early Cold War.The book also provides instructive points of comparison for scholars of the history of medicine and public health in Latin America during the same era.The book's temporal scope coincides with the first two decades of the autonomous Indonesian state, dominated by the figure of President Soekarno, who led the struggle for independence from the Netherlands.Soekarno provided the philosophical underpinnings that guided the critical task of nation-building, the leitmotif of Neelakantan's narrative.At independence, Indonesia was a vast archipelago, home to diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups; yet during the colonial era, power had been concentrated in the island of Java, with the corresponding neglect of many so-called "Outer Islands."The doctrine of pembangunan, devised by Soekarno, "sought to unify the country's centrifugal forces through a common project of shared national modernity" (Neelakantan, 2017, p.19).This appraisal of Indonesia's internal challenges to unity was coupled with a foreign relations stance known as the "Bandung Spirit" (or the "Bandung approach"), which called for the country's "technological self-sufficiency, non-alignment and solidarity with nations in a similar position" -that is, the recently decolonized nations of what would come to be known as the Third World (p.19).Out of necessity, Neelakantan simplifies Indonesia's political history, but argues convincingly that public health work, the organization of a national health care system, and the development of the medical Postcolonial nation-building and health in IndonesiaSaúde e construção da nação na Indonésia pós-colonial
Author: Eric Carter
Institution: Macalester College
Language: Portuguese
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2808091344