Warwick Anderson\u2019s Colonial Pathologies looks at the example of the American colonial experience in the Philippines to highlight the intersection of race and medicine. (Anderson 1) After the U.S. defeated the Spanish in the colony in 1898, the victor instituted policies that continued America’s nineteenth-century liberal reforming national identity. (Ibid) Scientific advancements were understood not only as a means to sanitize the natives, but to provide them with a chance to reach civilized status. The dangers of colonialism were not so much in the geography as\u00a0in the people, where disease became an element of racialization of Filipinos and disease (Ibid 2) While there was never formal segregation in the Philippines, the viewpoint of Filipinos as part innocent child\u00a0and dangerously backward permitted demarcation between colonized and colonizer. (Ibid 4, 108) White male bodies could also descend to the level of the native, giving them a personal stake in civilizing process.\u00a0These experiments in the Philippines provided a microcosm of society at large in which the minds of the West could experiment and take notes.\u00a0(Ibid\u00a06)<\/p>\n

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The insights provided by Anderson reminds me of Greg Grandin\u2019s Empire\u2019s Workshop<\/em>, where the U.S. imperial experience in Latin America gave it the strategies it used for larger-scale warfare in later periods.\u00a0As Michael Adas of Rutgers University notes in his review, \u201cAmerican interventions in Cuba, Panama, and other Caribbean locals shared the same military genesis, motivations, and modes of organization.\u201d (Adas) Anderson also argues that the \u201cracializing of liberal governmentally\u201d turned the formerly private lives of native people into the collective realms of public discourse, where military personnel became hygiene inspectors as evidenced in the “clean-up weeks.” (Ibid\u00a02-4, 117) I also reminisced about\u00a0Bernard S. Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge<\/em>, where\u00a0knowledge was a significant contributor to the Western colonial encounter. I appreciated that Mr. highbeejonathan mentioned the most controversial aspect of Anderson\u2019s book; namely, that many people benefited from this imperialistic excursions as sanitation\u00a0improvements\u00a0did, in fact, occur in the Philippines and techniques were developed and brought back to the U.S. (higbeejonathan; Anderson 3-4) A shortcoming in Colonial Pathologies<\/em>, as noted by Laurence Monnais of the University of Montreal, is that the \u201cthe Filipino body makes itself \u201cheard\u201d in Anderson\u2019s volume more than the \u201cvoices\u201d of Filipinos. (Monnais) This is due to the\u00a0dearth of resources maintained by the colonized, themselves, which renders a work focused on the goals and prejudices of colonizers. Still, this is a great lesson in how nineteenth-century imperialistic impulse both formed and was influenced by the science and\u00a0technology of the emerging twentieth-century.<\/p>\n

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Bibliography<\/p>\n

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Adas, Michael. Review of\u00a0Colonial Pathologies.\u00a0<\/em>American Historical Review (Dec. 2007).<\/p>\n

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Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines.\u00a0<\/em>Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.<\/p>\n

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Monnais, Laurence. Review of\u00a0Colonial Pathologies.\u00a0<\/em>American Ethnologist, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 3059-3062 (2008).<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warwick Anderson\u2019s Colonial Pathologies looks at the example of the American colonial experience in the Philippines to highlight the intersection of race and medicine. (Anderson 1) After the U.S. defeated the Spanish in the colony in 1898, the victor instituted policies that continued America’s nineteenth-century liberal reforming national identity. (Ibid) Scientific advancements were understood not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":841,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions\/841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}