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Warwick Anderson’s Colonical Pathologies American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (one of the coolest names ever besides Crockett) utilizes cultural and environmental lenses to examine how medical and racial intersect with imperialism and American boosterism and exceptionalism. Dividing the book into sections examining engagement of American military medicine, how Americans reshaped both public and private spheres, and reviewing case studies that further his stance. Utilizing this new history from the Pan-Pacific side, Anderson asserts that all medicine is colonial in its relation to the body. This ideology evolves over time into racialized epistemologies that change Filipino cultural discourse. ‘Medical Mobilization of civic potential ‘(p.4), combined with the bureaucratic boosters backing, creates this cultural change.
Diana Nguyen stated in her post, “What I found most intriguing was that Anderson never truly defines the concept of “biomedical citizenship” throughout his book but rather instead, her merely infer that compliance with medicalized colonial regimes would be interpreted as evidence for citizenship. “
I completely agree with this as I never actually could locate anything that nailed down what seemed like a key term and a critical point to the argument as Anderson states that the intention of the book is to “chart the colonial development and deferral of what might be called “biomedical citizenship,” (p.3). However, I do see the points that he laid out is defining what biomedical citizenship is within Americanization and its self-exceptionalism to desire to make non-American’s clean and fit for the new globalizing world. Characterizing both Filipino body and culture to show both progress and modernization creates a manufactured sense of place and self within the medical space. What he argues is an experience between both race and empire within the medical field. The result of this faux created citizenship through American medical exceptionalism is biomedical citizenship.
The other readings that came to my mind are Camp and her utilization of racialized agency within cultural boundaries set by Americans. Using the medical field as space, American’s cultural assertion on Filipino culture creates a myth of the culture as something less than American exceptional. The idea of how one’s body can not only be utilized to create mythicized agency and colonial boundaries of non-American cultural is apparent throughout the book. Another theme throughout the reading selections has been issuing authority over people’s body. How does one obtain it, keep and utilize tactical strategies to deploy faux agency? Moreover, with assigning authority, what history is left to be examined against the grain? I find this true with both this book and our covered histories like Commanche Empire, Fugitive Landscapes, A Misplaced Massacre, Chinatown War and Closer to Freedom. Imperial order always has a cost and is often at the expense of the people who live in created marginalized boundaries (both geographical and cultural). The last chapters of the book were by far my favorite as they examined boosterism group The Rockefeller Foundation and created racialized agency by associating disease with Filipino culture.