Germs and Ghosts: Transmissions of Health and Environment in Timor-Leste

What do Germs and Ghosts have in common? How do they intersect at times of crisis? Southeast Asia is at the forefront of continuing and emergent health and environmental catastrophes. From endemic dengue to climate change-induced disasters to Asian swine flu and global pandemics including SARs and COVID-19.

In Timor-Leste, and many other parts of Southeast Asia, the interrelationship between germs (viruses, disease, illness) and ghosts (spirits, ancestors and the dead) are part of indigenous animist beliefs which are widespread across the region. This project explores how these ethereal, yet sometimes tangible, agents relate to humans and each other. Working in collaboration with community radio stations, an overlooked but important source of health and environmental information in rural areas, this project aims to address epistemic injustice (Fricke 2007) and broaden biomedical approaches to health and environment.

Medical anthropologists are interested the way health is related to the wider physical, social and spiritual environment. With the threat of climate change and pandemics, global health institutions recently turned their attention to the intersections between health and the environment. This creates an important juncture in which to reexamine the relationship between biomedical and indigenous health. This project seeks to support environmental global health interventions whilst confronting colonial inequalities and biomedical dominance over situated indigenous knowledge.

In Timor-Leste radio stations inform communities of health and environmental risks. However such messages and knowledge come top-down from the state and global health institutions and do not reflect local realities or concepts of health and environment. This project uses 'collaborative audio ethnography' to co-produce a radio documentary podcast with community radio journalists and local health advocates. It will share situated environmental health knowledge between communities and inform global health professionals and policymakers about community approaches to health and the environment. In doing so it will both to provide an accessible public output to tackle epistemic injustice in global health knowledge.

Research Questions

1. How do biomedical and Southeast Asian animist models of health interrelate and cross epistemological boundaries?
2. How does this entanglement of health and environment, including the animist spiritual environment, shape community responses in times of crisis
3. How do global health interests in health and environments adopt, co-opt or refute indigenous health models?
4. How can the biomedical approaches in global health engage more equally with indigenous health beliefs and practices, and how might indigenous models challenge and broaden biomedical health concepts

Finanzierung:
Disruptive Innovation Seed Funding, ÖAW (2024-2025)