AnthroTalking

In this episode of AnthroTalking, we speak to Assunta Hunter about her ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, her doctoral research, and the struggles anthropologists might experience while conducting fieldwork in Thailand. Hunter tells us about how the community of Thai traditional medicine practitioners have adapted to the changes associated with the modernisation and professionalization of Thai traditional medicine (see references, Hunter 2013). She describes a new breed of practitioners in Thailand, as well as in Australia, who move freely between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ knowledge. As you will hear in the episode, the so-called ‘post-modern practitioners’ are at the forefront of novel patterns of knowledge creation – in which the state, the institutions of the profession and practitioners contest and cooperate in the creation of authoritative knowledge.