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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes a blue medical anthropology that reframes water in flooding context in Indonesia as a relational force shaping early-life health, care practices, and biological vulnerability.

Paper long abstract

In flood-prone regions of Indonesia, water is more than an environmental condition; it is a relational force that reorganize early-life health, care practices, and biological vulnerability. However, water often remains treated as background infrastructure rather than as an active force in medical and anthropological research. Therefore, in this paper, I propose a conceptual and methodological framework for practicing a blue medical anthropology that treats flooding and water exposure as active collaborators in shaping early-life vulnerability, care practices, and biological risk.

Drawing on public health, humanitarian, child health, nutrition, and governmental literature on flooding in Indonesia, alongside my training in medical and biological anthropology. I examine how flooding reorganizes caregiving routines, food access, sanitation, and maternal well-being during critical developmental periods. Floodwater mediates exposures to pathogens, disrupts nourishment, intensifies stress, and reshapes everyday practices of care, making early life a sensitive site for understanding hydrosocial vulnerability.

Conceptually, this paper brings insights from blue humanities and hydrofeminism into dialogue with medical anthropology by foregrounding the infant body as porous, environmentally embedded, and shaped through relations with water. Methodologically, I argue for integrating biological attention to nutrition, growth, and infection with watery ethnographic approaches attentive to seasonality, immersion, and sensory exposure. I outline prospective research strategies that combine caregiver narratives, observations of water use, and biological indicators of early-life stress and health.

By centering infants and caregivers in flood-prone context, I suggest that practicing anthropology with water enables care-based, depolarized approaches to climate vulnerability that bridge ecological crisis, biological embodiment, and everyday life.