ABSTRACT
In this article, I use an anthropological perspective to investigate how uncertainty and risk related to health are understood and managed by members of the Buddhist population living in the central part of Rakhine State, in Western Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), in a context of therapeutic pluralism and of a highly lacking formal health system. Drawing on data from six fieldwork trips, which I undertook between 2005 and 2014 in the Thandwe area (Rakhine), this article examines the ways in which the multiple and unstable factors shaping villagers’ health means that they lived in a permanent state of vulnerability and uncertainty. I explore how villagers responded to such uncertainty by engaging in preventive practices and when they fell sick, using more or less complex health-seeking processes to gain control of the threat at both the cognitive and practical levels. In my analysis, I note the ways in which the villagers tried different ways of dealing with the threat of illness, reflecting the plural nature of the local therapeutic system and the relationships of hierarchy and complementarity through which the components of this system are connected. I argue that Buddhism plays a key role in responses to such threats, yet, despite its dominance, it alone does not provide a way of dealing with all aspects of disease and the uncertainty related to it. Only its combination and articulation with the other components of the therapeutic system enable comprehensive action. My analysis not only shows how villagers’ coping strategies were largely rooted in socio-structural factors but also reflected their social biographies as well as the social contexts in which they live.
