 | vivek neelakantan Adjunct Faculty/ Historian of Medicine - Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences |
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01.02.2023-29.03.2023
From Bandoeng to Alma Ata: Southeast Asia and the Emergence of Primary Health Paradigm, 1937-78
The overall goal is finalizing the two publication projects in a scholarly and inspiring work environment. This includes consulting with experts and archives in Geneva which are essential for a qualitative conclusion of both books.
First, to conclude editorial work on the Geopolitics of Health in South and Southeast Asia, I will be meeting with experts from the WHO, the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the United Nations (UN) and consulting with their respective archives to consolidate the introductory chapter of the volume. I also intend to discuss major insights from the edited volume with Brocher co-residents through a sustained period of reflection.
Second, to utilize the Brocher Residency for the conclusion of the larger research project through the finalization of a monograph proposal entitled “From Bandoeng to Alma Ata: Southeast Asia and the Emergence of Primary Health Paradigm, 1937-78.” Specific goals of the proposed monograph are as follows:
(a) To historically situate the evolution of primary healthcare in Southeast Asia within late-colonial (1937-47) and Cold War (1948-78) contexts.
(b) To critically assess the influence of the Cold War in the establishment of the SEARO in 1948 and the centrality of India, Burma, Indonesia and Sri Lanka in articulating a distinct “Southeast Asian” regional approach to international health.
(c) To analyze the niche occupied by the SEARO in delineating health challenges unique to Southeast Asia, representing regional interests at the WHO Headquarters and ensuring compliance of member states to the directives of international aid agencies.
(d) To provide a plausible historical interpretation to account for the ascendence of vertical disease eradication programs such as the Global Malaria Eradication Campaign (1955-69), led by the WHO, in sharp contrast to the earlier emphasis accorded to preventive healthcare at Bandoeng (1937) by the League of Nations Health Organization. In other words, providing a plausible explanation for why the WHO’s earlier priority of preventive healthcare was derailed by the 1950s.
(e) To explore lesser-known stories in global health such as the biographies of women health diplomats, particularly Martha May Eliot (the Assistant Director-General of the WHO), Anthropologist Cora Dubois, Julie Sulianti Saroso (Head of Maternal and Child Health Services, Indonesia) and Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur (India’s first Minister of Health). The biographies in turn, collectively shed light on the historical circumstances that led to the marginalization of maternal and child health by vertical disease eradication campaigns by the mid-1950s.
(f) To account for historical and political factors that contributed to a resurgence of interest in Primary Healthcare by the early 1970s, apart from failure of the Global Malaria Eradication Program by 1969.
Vivek Neelakantan, a Southeast Asian Medical Historian, is currently an Associated Rsearcher with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Social Anthropology. His PhD—awarded in 2014 from the University of Sydney—examined Indonesia’s relations with the World Health Organization (WHO) during the Cold War. Between 2015-17, he was awarded the IIT Madras (IITM) Postdoctoral Fellowship. As an institute-sponsored Postdoctoral Fellow, he began a new line of research on the history of TB in postcolonial South India.
Since 2015, his research has attracted international funding from the Wellcome Trust, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Libraries and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. His research is featured in leading international journals such as Southeast Asian Studies, ISIS Current Bibliography, Topoi, Wellcome Open Research and Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde. His monograph Science, Public Health and Nation-Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia (2017) examined how Indonesia critically engaged with the question of modernization in the aftermath of World War II (1945-1965). His monograph was subsequently translated into Bahasa Indonesia by the leading Indonesian publisher KOMPAS (2019).
In 2016, Dr Neelakantan team-taught Social History of Medicine in Colonial India at IITM. Next, after completing his tenure as Postdoctoral Fellow at IITM, he was appointed as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Universitas Airlangga for two terms (2017-18) where he developed critical mass in Science and Technology Studies (STS), Research Methodology and mentored junior faculty members on the rubrics of academic writing for peer-reviewed journals. Towards the end of 2018, he was a Visiting Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore (IIM-IDR) where he designed a four-credit course on the Business History of India.
Since 2018, Dr Neelakantan is examining the regional histories of the WHO in Southeast Asia that is related to his wider book project that examines the Emergence of Primary Healthcare in Southeast Asia (1937-78). His edited volume "The Geopolitics of Health in South and Southeast Asia: Perspectives from he Cold War to COVID-19," is in print and will be published by Routledge in 2023.
Apart from the two book projects, Dr Neelakantan is involved in two collaborative projects. The first collaborative project with Universitas Airlangga seeks to explore the shifting understandings of leprosy in the Dutch East Indies and British India (1860-1940). The second research collaboration with eminent historian Marcos Cueto at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil investigates state responses to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and India. The third project, in collaboration with Eva-Maria Knoll at the Ausrian Academy of Sciences, investigates the history of cholera in the Indian Ocean World since the 19th c.
Since February 2022, Dr Neelakantan is a regular contributor to the Database of Religious History, a Digital Humanities Initiative, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the University of British Columbia.
Dr Neelakantan serves on the Editorial Board of Paramita: Historical Studies journal, published by Universitas Negeri Semarang, a state-run Indonesian university and Masyarakat Sejarahwan Indonesia or Indonesian Historical Society. He periodically reviews manuscripts for leading journals of the field including Medical History, Social History of Medicine, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde, and Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. Apart from English, Dr Neelakantan is fluent in Bahasa Indonesia and has a working knowledge of Hindi, Marathi and Tamil.
He is currently an Adjunct Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIMK) where he teaches the History and Evolution of Management Thought in the Postgraduate Liberal Studies in Management Program in the Summer of 2023.
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