This book is a fine study of the conjunction between the creation of a medicalising state and a traditional medicine practised among the Muslim minority in southern Thailand. Assuming that modern medicine has already been epistemologically instituted as the state's machination in monitoring and scrutinising its subjects' bodies, Claudia Merli's starting point is at a time when biomedical practices have been gathering pace in Thailand's medical landscape since the 1960s. Family-planning and demographic statistics are thus addressed as a central issue of Thailand's bio-power, when ‘the goal of demographic control passes from general family planning policies to the management of actual female bodies’ (p. 61). She argues that the state's policies were well accepted among Thai docile citizens, ‘the family planning programmes succeeded at the national level, while less so in the South’ (p. 24). The programmes encounter no resistance, except in a small corner of the Muslim minority in the southern part. There, traditional and indigenous medical practices are largely dominant, partly because they are the identity politics of their Malayness.

Modern midwifery has often clashed with Malay traditional midwifery through a series of biomedical practices concerned with pregnancy, antenatal care, childbirth and treatment of the afterbirth. Tracing from this crosshatch of different knowledge and practices, the author meticulously describes an indigenous cosmology of midwifery within the Malay world in Satun province, a former part of Kedah before the 1909 Anglo–Siam treaty: family tradition and transmission, incantations of magic words, transformative massage (to mould the child), labours and difficult deliveries, treatments of the afterbirth (such as burying the placenta, cutting the umbilical cord, toasting the mother in order to dry out the womb, etc). A perception and treatment of the monstrous placenta and the mummified children that are highly regarded as special amulets in Thai popular religious practices are also discussed at some length, together with the social dimensions of fatherhood at various stages of childbirth, whispering the azan to the child's ear, building a bed for the fire, stoking the fire, etc. In addition, a sunat (circumcision) ceremony is portrayed with its ceremonial practice and the local Islamic debate related to this issue.

Importantly, Merli has vividly shown that while the state's medicine attempted to bring pregnant bodies into its gaze and medicalisation, biomedical practices disclose the women's bodies for its observation in order to guard them from ‘the spectre of maternal mortality’ (p. 81). This modern medical ritual has led to the clashing of two epistemological worlds, since pregnant Muslim women's bodies that are customarily and religiously veiled from the public gaze are embarrassingly disclosed, observed and sometimes cut. Moreover, as a modern medical ritual associated with clinical practices, Caesarean section has ‘sever[ed] the woman's body from the corpus of local medical knowledge, from the tradition’ (p. 86). Biomedicine has, thus, transgressed a forbidden cultural and religious border inscribed on Muslim female bodies. In her own words, ‘the boundaries in question are not only the individual woman's boundaries but also the ethnic borders embodied in the women's bodies’ (p. 220). She asserts that bodily practices operated on the females' bodies by the state's medical agency have invoked a sharp consciousness of Muslim identities articulated by traditional bodily practices on the pregnant females' bodies and the afterbirth ceremonies.

One flaw of this book is its lack of a historical perspective on a biomedical institutionalisation in Thailand. The author explains that biomedicine was quite successful in encompassing Thai traditional medical practice, without tensions or negotiations, in the past or in the present. It was partly true, perhaps, but that would not be able to explain a durable existence of traditional herbal medicine and, recently, a rebirth of the Thai traditional healthcare system to be a main alternative medicine associated with the Ministry of Public Health. However, this book would be undoubtedly beneficial for students or scholars of Southeast Asian studies, particularly in understanding the self-glorification of Thailand's benevolent internal colonialism that led to the present unrest in the south and other parts of the empire. Biomedicine was recruited to clean a traditional practice in overcoming the spectre of maternal mortality. It was also an integral part in the state's campaign to erase poverty and backwardness in fighting the Thailand Communist Party during the Cold War and, recently, in fighting the ‘red germs’ uprising in the middle of the empire's capital. I would not be surprised at all, therefore, if her suggestions relating to medical identities could be applied to other parts of the empire such as the north or the northeast regions.