The Power of Remainder

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 influencing their effectiveness. At the heart of this work lies the innovative concept of "remainder," which reimagines healing as a process of navigating what is left behind, left out, or left unresolved. Remainders not only encompass karmic residue from past lives that determine vulnerability to illness, the nature of disorders, and the room of manoeuvre one has to cure them, but also the marginal positions of people and practices within the social space, the symptoms that linger in one’s body and the medical gaps encountered in the healing journey. Far from being merely constraining, these remainders offer a creative space for resilience, adaptability, and hope. This duality—where marginalization gives rise to innovation—positions The Power of Remainder as a bold challenge to conventional understandings of healing. What sets this book apart is its integrative approach, mapping the relationships between policy makers, healers, and patients to reveal how power dynamics and positionality shape medical choices and efficacy. By bridging religious studies and medical anthropology, the author dismantles traditional disciplinary silos, showing how the boundaries of medicine and Buddhism are locally constructed, negotiated and transcended, reflecting and affecting values and therapeutic actions. The Power of Remainder redefines the frameworks through which we view health, agency, and the possibilities of healing.