MOBILISING APPLIED MEDICAL

SCIENCES FOR INDONESIA

SOEKARNOIST SCIENCE AND ASIAN-AFRICAN SOLIDARITY
Speaker: Dr Vivek Neelakantan, Universitas Airlangga
 AIM AND OBJECTIVES
• Centrality of Medicine to postcolonial science in Indonesia
• Linkage between postcolonial science, esp. medicine and Cold War (1950S)
• Soekarnoist science? Was it a variant of postcolonial science more generally?
 NATURE OF SOEKARNOIST
SCIENCE
• Science as a tool to present political convictions of Soekarno as grounded in rationality
• Statist science
• Science as a means for realising Indonesian leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement and
minimising technological dependence on US or USSR
 HISTORIOGRAPHY
• Sunil Amrith (2006)
• Andrew Goss (2011)
• Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols (2012)
• Warwick Anderson (2012)
 SYMBOLISM IN SCIENCE
The question of rice? A want-to-live, or a want-to-die situation
 ASIAN-AFRICAN SOLIDARITY
• Was Bandung Conference of 1955, a Southeast Asian initiative to forge broader solidarities
during the Cold War?
• Non-alignment not an outcome of the Bandung Conference but was only shared by India,
Burma and Indonesia
• The episteme of Third World
 BANDUNG CONFERENCE (1955):
COMMUNIQUE
• Economic development, self-reliance of Asian and African nations in economic affairs, and
promotion of world peace
 THE COMPETING INTERESTS OF
THE COLD WAR
• The US under the Eisenhower Presidency (c.1955) supports malaria eradication in newly-
independent nations
• USSR capitalises on Bandung and Third World Solidarity
• Stalin’s death and emergence of Nikita Khruschev
 USSR AND INTL. HEALTH: POST
1955
• Deputy Soviet Minister of Health D.D. Venediktov contends that question of health is socio-
economic one
• His vision for ameliorating heath conditions in Asia and Africa is translated into Bahasa
Indonesia
• Aids mass campaigns against smallpox
• Fellowships to Indonesian Minister of Health to study the USSR health system (1961)
INSTITUTION BUILDER: SARWONO
PRAWIROHARDJO
 PEDIATRICS AND NATION-
BUILDING
• Appropriation of Bandung Spirit
 CONCLUSION
• The So-What question?

• So what can we make of Asian-African Conference (Bandung) spirit? What were its
implications for postcolonial science?