Research profile >> Steve Ferzacca
University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB, Canada
Anthropology – Sound – Lived Experience – Medical Anthropology – Indonesia – Deep
Sound – Somaphoric Organization
My research activities have been mostly oriented to the ethnography of health and
medicine. I’ve had the opportunity to learn and write about clinical encounters of various
kinds, the management of Type 2 diabetes, and medical pluralism in both Indonesia and
the United States. My study of medical pluralism in Indonesia, Healing the Modern in a
Central Javanese City (2001), is an interpretive and phenomenological exploration of the
relationship between medical practice, the health of modernity, and Javanese structures of
experience. This work has taken place in Yogyakarta, where I have worked for some 17
years. I am currently learning about Javanese articulations of self, health, and emotivity,
the affect of Indonesian urban life on gender relations, populist Islam and health, and
the cultural logic of risk, sexuality, and the social life of youth in western Canadian
resort towns. Two book projects remain in-the-making: one that is a collection of essays
entitled, Marvelously Real: Essays on Cultural Subjects, that examines the function of
culture as the way humans remember from moment to moment to be human by making
the phenomenally real magically real. The other, entitled Promises, Promises, is an
anthropological memoir on alcohol recovery.
E-mail: steven.ferzacca@uleth.ca