Given the attempts in the United States to reconcile the country's haunting past during the Vietnam War, a consolation in the form of some ghosts from Southeast Asia is timely. From this perspective, Jean Langford's account of dying, death rituals, mourning, and ghosts of postwar US emigrants from Laos and Cambodia — where spirits are taken very seriously — could be very enlightening. Even the Lao leader in Luang Prabang in 1977 had ‘declared that all spirits attached to the temples in the old royal capital were “feudal”, conducted a ceremony at a spirit shrine to inform all the spirits that the king had been deposed and sent to “seminar” (reeducation camp)’ and that ‘the spirits must choose whether to follow him, become monks, or flee the country’ (p. 73).

In meditating on memories of violent wartime deaths, ‘forms of engagement with death and the dead that are precluded or marginalised by thanatopolitical institutions’ (p. 5), and stories of ghosts and long-distance mourning for ancestor-spirits in their homeland, Langford sets out to inform an American audience how their erstwhile collaborators in Southeast Asia had sacrificed their lives and worldly goods for the American War. In spite of great suffering, their contributions were not recognised, and the promises made by the CIA operatives they worked with of ‘material assistance and new homes in exchange for their military service’ (p. 10) were only partially, or never, delivered.

Some felt completely betrayed. Langford's subject is the alienation of their estranged lives, pathologically expressed. In short, her work attempts to ‘understand an ongoing attention to the dead or the place-specific spirits as primarily symptomatic of cultural loss’ (p. 9) for those former allies in Laos and Cambodia who became immigrants in the United States after a disastrous war.

Her investigation is not, however, limited to the biopolitics of the medical discursive regime per se, but it is an attempt to tackle thanatopolitical regimes at a moment when ‘everyday biopolitics ... involves determinations about the relative value of particular lives, the relative permissibility of particular deaths, and an implicit governance of the traffic between living and dead’ (p. 4). Langford's book moves from stories of how the lives of America's allies were torn apart, to their symptoms of trauma and ‘the ever-present loss of culture’ (p. 9), to the treatment of death, and dead bodies that are handled in culturally inappropriate ways in American hospitals and funeral homes ‘as empty corpses devoid of social presence’ (p. 12), and to the ghosts that were disturbed and needed remedial rituals.

This is not a conventional ethnography. Most accounts were extracted from interviews of immigrant-patients and their relatives at diverse sites, i.e. refugee camps, hospitals, immigrant communities, temples, graveyards, etc. These were sifted through translation, sometimes with intentional mistranslations, as she indicates in places. From these fragmented episodes of trauma and ghost stories, Langford weaves a path through violent traces, displacements, disciplines of dying, language, power, postmortem economies, spirit debt, and the status of ghosts. However, in spite of such canny manoeuvring to shed light on these Lao and Cambodian ghost stories, this approach interprets animist spirit beliefs about the dead via psychoanalysis, i.e. as post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead of framing it within a culture, the ghastly spirits are thereby simply seen to be wanting to ‘speak to lost connections and unhealed wounds related to violence and exile’ (p. 77).

Another attempt to revive ‘lost connections’ is an edited volume by Lawrence Monnais and Thomas Cook, Global movements, local concerns: Medicine and health in Southeast Asia. Mostly, it reveals medical connections between the empires and their colonial worlds, especially the introduction of Western medicine to Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century; eight essays from this volume embed their explorations within a more or less colonial context. The volume's highly diverse chapters somehow form a trajectory of Southeast Asian healthcare systems from the nineteenth century up to the present.

While Thomas B. Colvin's and C. Michele Thompson's chapters share their concerns with the introduction of vaccines to Southeast Asia — in the Philippines and Vietnam in particular — and Michael G. Vann sheds light on cholera and the racial discourse of medicine in colonial Vietnam, the other five chapters explore different directions. Raquel A.G. Reyes's chapter on midwifery in nineteenth-century Philippines and Liesbeth Hesselink's chapter on perceptions of indigenous Western-trained doctors about traditional healers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Dutch East Indies highlight the encounter between indigenous healthcare and modern medicine. Further, Annick Guenel's chapter on the 1937 Bandung Conference on rural hygiene and Ooi Keat Gin's chapter on the anti-opium campaign in colonial Malaya reveal the closure of ancient imperial enterprises before the war.

Liew Kai Khiun's chapter on the philanthropic anti-hookworm campaign of the Rockefeller Foundation in Southeast Asia broaches a new forged connection between this region and a benevolent neocolonial agency that was not so innocuous in its aim to create a ‘healthier’ atmosphere for world capitalism with American domination. And this new force is clearly articulated in Yu-Ling Huang's chapter on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the politics of access to medicines in Thailand. Meanwhile, Ayo Wahlberg's account on a grassroots movement of traditional medicine in Vietnam is an excellent reflection on the resuscitation of traditional healing practices and herbal medicine in Southeast Asia since the decline of antibiotics.

However, the closing chapter on medicine and public health in Thai historiography by Chatichai Muksong and Komatra Chuengsatiansup is a bit out of place and the reader is left wondering how it relates to the previous chapters. Nonetheless, their chapter is also worth a read. Chatichai and Komatra survey historical writings on medicine and public health in Thailand, which are also embedded in a trajectory of Thai historiography that has increasingly become ‘a political battle ground’ with regard to ‘the history of … indigenous medicines’ in the past few decades (p. 241).

Another attractive and well-organised volume on the history of Southeast Asian medicine is Cleanliness and culture: Indonesian histories, edited by Kees van Dijk and Jean Gelman Taylor. By framing their explorations in the discourse on cleanliness and hygiene, the volume treads on new territory in Southeast Asian histories of culture and medicine. It superbly reveals that while hygiene and sanitary campaigns to combat contagious diseases and epidemics in the nineteenth century legitimised some medical practices and the interventions of colonial health authorities in the Dutch East Indies, soap, bathing, and washing became a reference point of civilisation. Soap was thus mobilised as a colonial instrument to police and domesticate the bodies of native and non-white subjects. Apart from Kees van Dijk's and Jean Taylor's excellent chapters on soap and bathing, there is a chapter each on beriberi in Bangka and C. Eijkman's Nobel Prize-winning nutritional research by Mary Somers Heidhues; housing and health in Sulawesi by David Henley; the cleanliness police and gays in the Indies by Marieke Bloembergen; hair-washing by George Quinn; and tropical spa culture by Bart Barendregt. Cleanliness and culture is undoubtedly a pleasurable read and will inspire many readers.