Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
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Colonial Pathologies is a groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s. Warwick Anderson describes how American colonizers sought to maintain their own health and stamina in a foreign environment while exerting control over and “civilizing” a population of seven million people spread out over seven thousand islands. In the process, he traces a significant transformation in … More >>
Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines
Colonial medicine has been a major issue of debate in social science these years. One reason for that is the emergence of globalization that elevates previous colonies to the focus of attention because of their roles in the global system of production and their peculiar political configurations. No longer subliminal, these ex-colonies however pose intriguing but difficult questions regarding various aspects of (post-)modernity. How did they deal with the so-called colonial legacy? How did the modernity defined in “the West” mean to them? What insights can we get by looking at the disciplinary process that the colonized people embraced, or worse, endured? Or, for this book, what is the relations between the medical and public health measures in colony and those in metropolis?
It is easy for studies of this kind to fall back into either a progressivist eurocentric argument (such as Basalla’s diffusionism) or a normative pluralistic claim. The former refers to a pattern of diffusion of knowledge from the center (read Europe) to the periphery (the rest of the world); the latter means that we need to appreciate the achievements not only in the center but also in the periphery. But Anderson pushes the claim further. He challenges the logic of the center/periphery division and argues that in fact, the center of colonial force may be the periphery of knowledge production. The conceptual hierarachy is shaken and replaced with a more reciprocally dynamic and interactive notion. Think about the medical knowledge that was obtained in the Philippines but was later applied in America.
Aside from this theoretical breakthrough, his account gives vivid evidence to some other arguments already made by other authors–modernity as a disciplinary and biopolitical process which aims not only at achieving social order but also at reshaping individual body and mind. In addition, his attention to (and discussion on) tropical neurasthenia is splendid because this topic is often left out in other colonial medicine studies.
In brief, I think this book is a must read in colonial medicine studies. Even though there are some concepts, like biomedical citizenship, that still need more substantiating examples, globally speaking this is a wonderflly written and well organized piece of work.
Rating: 5 / 5
“An entire nation had to be rehabilitated” (Anderson, Colonial Pathologies 69). In Colonial Pathologies, Anderson argues that empire and nation-building by the US after the American conquest of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-War illuminates the part played by medicine in America’s internal and external drives to expand and to assimilate annexed indigenous population by “sanitizing the race.” “Anderson writes, “As Americans attempted to erase or abstract their corporality, Filipinos had become the chief and most generous sources of contaminating matter… [they were] often seen as ‘promiscuous defecators’ transgressing colonial safe havens” (Anderson, Colonial Pathologies 128-129). Initially concentrated on environmental risk for US soldiers the discussion refocused rather quickly to germs, the new seeds of disease, located in local fauna, which included Filipinos.
After 1900, medical strategies and military tactics derived from mutually reinforcing renditions of the need to contain and discipline the hostile and increasingly mobile agents in the region, whether germ or insurrecto (Anderson, Colonial Pathologies 47). Theoretical interventions includes to clarify the effects that medicalized and racialized notions of the Filipino body had on both the colonized and colonizer; Previous belief to diffusion of knowledge was from the center (read Europe) to the periphery (the rest of the world) leading to appreciation of the achievements not only in the center but also in the periphery. However, Anderson pushes the claim further. He challenges the logic of the center/periphery division and argues that in fact, the center of colonial force may be the periphery of knowledge production. Anderson’s method include, but is not limited, to: 1) an interdisciplinary approach, 2) literary and cultural analysis (text from post colonial essay — particularly data from US department public health divisions), 3) historiography — interweaving essays “to suggest continuities between the late colonial civilizing process and international development projects [and to] trace the genealogy of development back to the medical mobilization of civic potential in the Philippines in the early twentieth century” (Anderson, Colonial Pathologies 4). Anderson effectively uses Foucault in colonial context.
Rating: 5 / 5