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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I examine how the acquisition of expertise backed by state support for certain forms of practice and education has created moral tensions within the Thai traditional medicine community. I highlight the contradictions and moral tensions inherent in the emergence of expertise in modernity.

Paper long abstract:

There are moral dimensions to the acquisition and creation of professional expertise in a rapidly modernising country and this paper explores how notions of expertise are intimately connected to forms of education and to cultural understandings of knowledge, legitimacy and value. I draw on ethnographic material from research in Thailand that shows how health policies have re-shaped the practice of Thai traditional medicine through university-based education, the licensing of practitioners and the introduction of a scientific rationale for treatment. University education has transformed the status and aspirations of students studying Thai traditional medicine and created tensions within the traditional medicine community about the knowledge base and the status of licensed and unlicensed practitioners.

The regulation of practitioners and the establishment of a state-supported hierarchy of legitimacy and skill that excludes unlicensed traditional medicine practitioners, highlights the contradictions and moral tensions inherent in the emergence of expertise in modernity. I examine the moral dimensions of the selective authorisation of modern licensed practitioners and the de-legitimation of folk healers whose skills are obtained through apprenticeship, experience and adherence to Buddhist values. Local moral worlds continue to challenge and disrupt modernised approaches to knowledge acquisition established through university education and licensing. The contradictions and moral tensions inherent in professional recognition for one group exemplify the problems associated with medical expertise cultivated through university training that carries with it the status, values and meanings associated with the institutions of modern medicine and education.