Focusing on hybrid health practices and perceptions in Yogyarta, Indonesia, this ethnographic study describes Javanese approaches to their own health and the health of modernity. Based on his observations of and interviews with the people there, Ferzacca (University of Lethbridge) details a pluralistic system of urban medicine. In so doing, he describes the Javanese construction of self, and contradicts earlier anthropological studies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Healing the Modern in a Central Javanese City (Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series)

Politics & Social Sciences

Pamela J. Stewart

Ferzacca, Steve

Anthropology

Carolina Academic Press

The basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities, ages, and generations to make a sonic way of life. Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this multi-modal (text, musical composition, social media, performance) sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life in Singapore. The heart and soul of this community is English Language rock and roll music pioneered in Singapore by several members of the 1960s legendary "beats and blues" band, The Straydogs, who continue to engage this community in a sonic way of life. &nbsp; Grounded in debates from sound studies, Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour's ideas of the social--continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, "associations of heterogeneous elements" of human and non-human "mediators and intermediaries"--to portray a community entangled in the confounding relations between vernacular and national heritage projects. Music shops, music gear, music genres, sound, urban space, neighborhoods, State presence, performance venues, practice spaces, regional travel, local, national, regional, and sonic histories afford expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning, in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this deep sound is fiercely cosmopolitan, yet entirely Singaporean. What emerges is a vernacular heritage drawing upon Singapore's unique place in Southeast Asian and world history.

Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore

Social Sciences

National University of Singapore Press

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