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Psychiatry developed as a modern branch of medical knowledge in Western societies and arrived in Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth century. Dutch colonialism brought psychiatry and psychology to the Dutch East Indies as part of the development of European therapeutics in that part of the empire. During the twentieth century, psychiatry was naturalized in Indonesia (and other Southeast Asian countries) and integrated into the national health care system. In the post-independence period, most Indonesian psychiatrists – there are currently about 450 – received training at Western universities and brought the knowledge of this subject back with them to their home country.

At the turn of the millennium, inhabitants of a small Karen village situated in one of Thailand’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites sought access to environmental justice in the Thai courts over industrial pollution that had contaminated their local stream with lead and caused them years of degraded health and social misery. The Karen villagers were only able to gain access to justice with the help of NGOs that served them as a support group during a period when Thailand was experiencing active civil and democratic awakening. The NGOs, which had a common cause with the Karen villagers, helped them enter the ‘environmental justice frame’ and its discourse. Their experience of lead pollution was framed within a moral ‘rhetoric of exposure’, which came to guide their activism against intransigent agencies and policies, as well as their mobilization for access to justice.

This article explores therapeutic shamanic sounds in relation to Orang Sakai ideas of (altered) consciousness. The argument given is that within a shamanic epistemology the very idea of producing sound involves an assumption of the material existence of non-physical beings as sound-makers. Such sounds are conceived to be as materially real as are ordinary physical sounds. The article argues further that sound is not only experienced through hearing but can also be inter-sensorially experienced through the perception of sight. Moreover, ocular perception can refer to both seeing with the eyes and seeing with the 'inner eye', which for Sakais is an organ and not a mental function. Finally, given that sound can be inter-sensorially experienced, this article questions the validity of the oral/aural concept for non-literate societies.

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