Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 18

8 T HE S ACRED AND THE S ANITARY: T HE C OLONIAL M EDICALIZATION OF THE F ILIPINO B ODY

Julius Bautista with Ma. Mercedes Planta

Over the course of Philippine history, the spiritual and physical state of Filipino bodies influenced the interaction between colonial subjects and the authorities who ruled over them. Both the American and Spanish regimes imposed political, economic and social changes that encouraged a revision of peoples ideas about their own corporeality. These revisions were enacted through highly regulated and regimented prescriptions and proscriptions relating to both spiritual and physical demeanour. The task of this paper is to trace the scope of these imposed normatives of conduct, and to determine how they manifested the broader ethics and agendas of the colonial regimes that ritualized and institutionalized them. The general issue this paper seeks to address is: how was the native body forced to contort itself to the vocabularies and agendas of two colonial regimes in the Philippines? How were these normatives deployed in written form? Michel Foucaults influence on contemporary Philippine social theory has been considerable enough to inspire a significant literature on the surveillance, regulation and administration of colonial bodies. Works such as that of Mojares (2003), Salman (1995), Anderson (1992) and Ileto (1988) discuss the vicissitudes of Filipino bodies within increasingly sophisticated institutions of doctrinal and medical regimentation. Inspired by Foucault and, though less explicitly, by the somatic theories of Marcel Mauss, scholars have found reason to argue that Filipino bodies are discursively constituted not just through religious doctrine but also through the requirements of colonial medicine and penology. A distinctive trend in many papers on the Filipino body is to argue that the body itself is a
147

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

canvas on which is inscribed deeper structural arrangements of power and knowledge; arrangements that manifest relationships of domination and subordination beneath the more formal administrative or religious policies of colonial regimes. Filipino scholar Resil Mojares astutely notes, however, that with all this focus on the wider matrices of power and knowledge, not much attention is given [to] less dramatic transformations in the everyday minutiae of bodily practices and how these interweave with the perceptions and actions of persons in the social field (2003: 172). Mojares invites us to consider the effect of colonial regimes on a level that was more intimate and mundane: how, for example, were Filipinos retaught to bathe, dress and groom themselves? What kind of table manners were they asked to observe? This paper argues that a response to Mojares entails a discussion of the extent to which the Filipino body was made to adhere to a new set of rituals of piety. This is a concept that describes the range of everyday bodily activities and passivities that, when observed, determined a specific kind of moral, proper or cooperative subjectivity. This involved a reformatting of habits, demeanour and countenance so that the body may be aligned towards the general ethic of the ruling regime. What, for example, were the norms of social etiquette Filipinos adhered to, even outside the surveillance of priests or colonial authorities? What new medicinal routines were they made to conduct before going to sleep so as to ensure a healthy functioning body, even when there was no doctor present? The significant aspect of these rituals is their normativity that they are introduced and imposed directives to which Filipino bodies were subjected as an execution of the colonial mandate. While the main aim of this paper, therefore, is to make a more detailed analysis of the everyday minutiae of such rituals of piety, we also aim to maintain, at least as an underlying principle, the Foucauldian concern with how relations of colonial power become inscribed in personal rituals of intimacy, obedience and subservience. It is not our intention here to suggest that the body was the most important political focus of colonial regimes. Rather, we suggest that the body can be used as a heuristic in which the wider character of colonial and anti-colonial regimes can be understood. While scholars such as Mojares (2003) have already engaged in detailed analysis of the everyday practices of the body during the Spanish period, we aim to extend the analytical gaze further across time to reflect the directions towards which Filipino bodies were forced to bend. As our second section will show, there are interesting differences between the body as conceived in both Spanish and American colonial regimes. By discussing these two periods as a comparative project, we suggest that what Turner (1997a) describes as the medicalization of the body can find expression in a South-East Asian context (ibid: 29). The medicalization of the body is a process in which religious notions of ascetic practice and piety were gradually supplanted or replaced by secular medical and physiological regimens. The general trend of secularization in
148

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

Western societies, according to this theory, can be described by a resemblance between the roles of clergy and medical practitioners. In the Philippines, we can see this movement in the very transition between two colonial administrations: from an Iberian missionary concern with the regulation of the bodys religious well-being to an American concern with the regulation of the body as an essentially medical unit. In both regimes, written manuals were used to deploy ideals of ritual or sanitary purity and piety. As our title suggests, we seek to trace the discursive movement from a sacred to a sanitary milieu terms which embody the moral and ethical agendas of the Spanish and American colonial regimes respectively, and which describe the very transition of the Philippines towards secularization and modernity.

The Native Body as Canvas


Before rituals of intimacy can be discussed in the context of specific colonial regimes, it is important to survey the Filipino body in its native state; that is, before the imposition of either forms of hegemonic colonial control. Both Spanish and American policies towards the regulation of Filipino bodies were generally framed in the rhetoric of promoting a regime of cleanliness, either through spiritual purification or disease prevention. The implication here is that Filipino bodies were inherently in need of a cleansing that only the purveyors of colonialism could provide. Yet it is significant to note that even early Spanish accounts of the customs of Filipinos are replete with descriptions of the peoples good health and meticulous hygienic practices. Sixteenth-century observers such as Pigafetta (1524) and early seventeenth-century observers such as Chirino (1604) thought native bodies noteworthy for their refinement and focus on physical cleanliness. What we consistently find in such depictions is a pleasured, cleansed, decorated and indulged native body. Moreover, the native will to hygiene and cleanliness is consistently depicted as a personal habit observed of ones own volition. This suggests that even according to Spanish standards of physical cleanliness, there was nothing inherently unclean about the native body before the imposition of their Western rituals of piety. Chirino observes:
From the time these islanders are born, they grow up in the water They bathe at any hour without distinction, for pleasure or cleanliness and on coming out of the bath, they anoint their hair with sesame oil mixed with civet ... [T]hey bathe squatting down almost sitting, with the water up to their neck, taking the greatest care not to be visible even if there is nobody who could see them In each house they have a water jar at the door and whoever goes up, whether from the household or an outsider, takes water from there to wash his feet before entering They do this with great facility, rubbing one foot against the other and the water runs through the house floor, which is all bamboo like a very tight grating. (Scott 1994: 116)

149

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

Bathing, observes Chirino, is not a chore determined by the conditions of a hot and harsh environment. There is, on the contrary, a sense of luxurious excess in natives technologies of care; depicted in the native use of local herbs and flowers for perfume and other superfluities What, then, was it about the native body that needed colonial intervention and reformation? What sorts of changes did the Spanish clergy envision in their attempts to re-inscribe native bodies? We shall see in the discussion below that as the inheritors of medieval Christian morals, Spanish clergy were concerned not with an inherently uncleansed physical body, but with instituting reforms that sought to modify the body in a sentimental and moral sense. Faced with the momentous task of aiding civic administrators in a strange and often hostile environment, Spanish religious mandate became intertwined with the colonial imperative of managing bodies as religio-administrative units. It is with these sentimental and moral impositions on the body, manifested as they were in written form, that this initial section is concerned.

The Spanish Regime: Turning Away From the Native Body


In the Spanish colonial regime (15651896), administrative control depended largely on the role of the clergy who prescribed that the bodys physical upkeep must correspond with certain codes of religious piety and spiritual purification. These prescriptions, often relating to intimate aspects of personal hygiene and social etiquette, were deployed not just from official channels but, as we shall see, through manuals, gazettes and written codes of behaviour as well. In this section, we seek to discuss how Spanish missionaries promoted what have been termed rituals of intimacy. They are intimate because they had to do with very personal technologies of bodily upkeep, over many of which colonial authorities did not have full surveillance. They are rituals because these acts are defined by the expectation of repetitive and prolonged observance, which were codified and institutionalized in the literature and doctrine of the missionary orders. Rituals of intimacy, therefore, included not just formal acts of religious piety, such as personal and community worship, confession, conducting of the sacraments, observation of rituals and so fourth. These also included normatives for grooming, decorum, directives of proper moral behaviour, all of which the native was expected to perform and administer upon the self in the private realms of mind and body. In a broader sense, Spanish rule sought to bring about a significant reinscription of the body through a reformatting of physical geography. Through a program of reduccion (reduction), people of various discreet settlements were rounded up into larger cabecceras (population centres). The centripetal force of the cabecera consisted of the staging of festivals in the name of a patron saint in order to entice natives into settling within it. Having the Church and
150

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

government house at its centre, the new territorial order sought to impose a mode of living where all ideas about piety originated from a single, clearly identifiable source. The cabeccera had at its apex God and the Spanish King to whom all those living within its boundaries were devoted. This entailed a profound transformation of Filipino ways of life whereupon their immediate and past loyalties to animist spirits were discouraged and actively dispelled. Natives were, as Mojares observes, taught to be turned steadfastly towards God, to avoid the present, to regard the things of the world as dream, smoke or wind as, in the political sphere, they were to be bound to the Spanish realm in acts of civic disobedience, casing away the brute instincts of their former state (2000: 10). The transformation of physical geography was extended towards arresting the natives brute instincts to comply with a Judeo-Christian sense of piety. It was an explicit attempt at reformatting internalized norms of behaviour, in order to rediscipline their bodies according to the doctrine of the Catholic Church. The cabeccera was the framework by which urbanism had become closely identified with humanity, civilization and progress. Correspondingly, those unreduced bodies living outside the scope of the newly defined political centres were labelled and treated accordingly: as savages, pagan, bandits who may well have been wild and not quite human. This demarcation engendered by the reduccion was vital to the propagation of the colony in light of a persistent insurgency and recalcitrance to its project. The notion of town centre as a fixed and clearly bounded unit of domination is problematized by the secret practice of native agency, particularly in places where Spanish civic jurisdiction did not extend. The continued relevance of babaylanes (spirit mediums), albularios (faith healers) and other assocaciones illicitas (illicit associations) throughout the Spanish regime is testament to these modes of resistance. The works of Ileto (1979) and Rafael (1988) are notable examples of scholars who have written about technologies of Filipino resistance to the religio-civilizing missions of the Church. Though we do not engage in a detailed analysis of resistance in this paper, the observations made here must be seen in relation to a wider corpus of works that discuss native Filipino recalcitrance to the colonial project. In addition to these patterns of resettlement, a corpus of missionary texts prescribed how various modes of personal and bodily piety were to be observed. The earlier examples, called catons, were simple lists of how one ought to behave and were typically included as an appendage to prayer books and confessionals. Eventually, catons became published on their own as manual de urbanidad (manuals of urbanity) which was a fairly common genre in the colonial Philippines from as early as the sixteenth century. Small enough to place in ones pocket, these compact volumes were typically designed to be in ones possession at all times itself an imposed change to the bodys physical posture and comportment. The manuals were more than just a reference guide in times of crisis. They were meant to be read time and again, even in repetition, to ingrain how Christian doctrine should be manifested as somatic habit and practice.
151

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

Scholars such as Mojares (2003) have conducted insightful analyses of such manuals and what we seek to do here is build upon those insights. In this paper, we focus on a manual written in Bisaya which Mojares has analysed. This manual was written by Father Pedro de Estrada, S.J. in 1734 and published under the title Lagda cun suludnun sa tauong Visaya sa Pagcamaligdon ug sa mga maayong gaui sa ngatanan nga mga cahimtang sa Nang quinabuhi/hinusay sa usa ca pareng Agustino Calzado sa Sugbu. Lagda is a Visayan term meaning manners or codes of behaviour. This particular volume is a book of about eighty pages, containing twenty-two chapters which saw numerous reprints in 1746, 1850, 1865 and 1893, suggesting its widespread popularity and use (Zaide 1990). In describing manuals such as the Lagda, we discover as much about the vicissitudes of missionary and colonial agency as we do about the bodies they sought to regulate. What do these manuals say and how did they attempt to reformat the native body?

The Spiritual Reformatting of the Native Body


Manuals such as the Lagda did not only mandate a mere adjustment of behaviour and attitude. It required the suppression of the bodys most natural impulses, as though doing so were merely matter of will and initiative. One is asked, for example, to: Endeavour not to cough, to spit, or do anything else that will cause noise and disturb others attention from the mass (Estrada 1734: 266); If you see something that surprises you, just turn around to look at it. Do not open your mouth wide in wonder like a crocodile catching flies (ibid.: 264); If you are talking with your superiors, do not make fun of them. Control yourself from yawning, making noise with your throat, spitting or stretching yourself before them. Do not make noises, do not fix your hair, do not pick up things and break them into little pieces because it will distract your attention to them (ibid.: 276). The body that is depicted in these directives is one that is inherently inclined towards undesirable natural impulses. Native bodies, moreover, are defined by the unreflective impulse to act upon and appease them. The urge to cough, the urge to scratch, the urge to gape at something surprising are impulses that, while natural, are transgressions of ethical and social normatives. What the Lagda is assuming, therefore, is a human righteousness that is dependent upon the natives success in overcoming a body that is predisposed towards leading one away from the ideal of civilized behaviour. Yet it is not merely a matter of inhibiting or conquering these bodily functions. The alternative to suppressing ones natural impulses and urges is equally undesirable. Natives are expected to strike a precarious balance between two undesirable extremes of behaviour. For example, natives are ordered: Do not use perfume because you will be suspected of being a person of easy virtue. On the other hand, do not tolerate unpleasant body odour because you will be loathed and avoided by others (ibid.: 273). Similarly: You should not wink nor look from the tails of your eyes, nor stare at anybody. Most
152

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

of all, you should not glare at people as if you are suspicious of them. Do not affect a pensive glance either, because this is a characteristic of lunatics (ibid.: 273). Ones posture, movement and demeanour had to be regulated according to the expectations of a pious other. The precariousness of this situation, however, is that even the absence of any kind of movement also carries the possibility of breaching ideal behaviour. If we think of a body that attempts to be faithful to these directives, what one might imagine is a body that is constantly preoccupied with balancing between two extremes of natural inclination and moral piety. The body that the Lagda conjures, therefore, is a highly regulated entity that is subject to rules of movement, posture and behaviour. For example, natives are ordered: Keep your head straight, your body still and your feet together (ibid.: 267); Do not indulge in joking as it may sometimes verge on the indelicate (ibid.: 269); On the table: If the one beside you needs anything, let it be known by the waiter. Avoid talking with anybody, asking question, or looking around or moving too much (ibid.: 272). It is as though movement itself is inhibited, unless that movement is entirely directed towards the fulfilment of very specific (though sometimes contradictory) norms of behaviour. Yet this balancing act implies the (almost comic) possibility of misinterpretation. Pushing the undesirable naturalness of the body even further is the (unnecessarily) vitriolic simile, that typically accompanies the mandated codes of behaviour. These similes are often in reference to an animal or an element of nature. The clear implication here is that these codes of behaviour are meant to take natives away from the state of nature that they are normally inclined to adhere. On Conduct of a Child in School for example, natives are instructed: Dont be like a dalansiang [a native bird] chatting with other children, on the other hand, do not just sit quietly but make use of the time by reading or writing because a person without any knowledge is like the rafter only of a boat (ibid.: 268). Yet for all the Lagda prescribes about how people should behave, it is a text that says a lot about its author. On the one hand, the references to flora and fauna indigenous to the local environment suggest the Friars intimacy with the milieu of those he is addressing. In a sense, it is the friars own indigenization having lived in the colony for several years that justifies his authority to regulate the natives most intimate ways of life. On the other hand, however, this reveals much about the frustrations, desperation and failures of the friar in acquiring native compliance. Its as though the Lagda is a progression of thoughts and afterthoughts a sigh of desperation from a friar who was hopelessly overwhelmed by the mission which he had been given. The manual in this sense is not a mere utility towards the friars mandate, but an attempt to negotiate the tribulations it presents. The penning of the manual was an act that duplicated the friars physical efforts in the pulpit by codifying the messages that he so often (and hopelessly) repeated to no avail. One wonders whether the friar found writing the manual cathartic.
153

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

Indeed, the manual is the friars attempt to gain access and control natives during moments which he cannot survey at night, at the waking hours, when he is not watching. Natives were expected to follow it during these times, most importantly. Reading a great deal of the manuals, we can observe the assumption of the writers absence. On Conduct During Bedtime, for example, natives are instructed:
If you wake up in the middle of the night and you are troubled make the sign of the cross, call the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph and say Help me my God and give me strength right away. Help me Blessed Virgin Mary so that my body and soul will be clean and I will not be ashamed to face the judgement of God. In the morning follow the instructions given in this book. (ibid.: 283)

While the manual insists upon a consistent adoption of its tenets, the sensation that one gets from reading it is to wonder if the friar himself is acting in this way. There are also sections of the Lagda which shift the gaze towards the writer himself, and the regulatory body which he represents. We get the impression that by the act of writing the code, the friar himself seems exempt from that which he preaches not to express any grudge against the government (ibid.: 274). The sheer simplicity of such directives expresses an audacious assurance of the moral legitimacy of Spanish rule and of the Spanish friar as the dispenser of that rule. The at times contradictory nature of its mandates suggests that they were produced at random, conjuring images of a friar who sat thinking about the entire spectrum of native transgressions and writing them out without contemplation of possible misinterpretation. It also suggests the friars utter belief in his moral authority and the expectation of native compliance to his own unquestionable moral authority. If this message is unclear, it is incumbent upon the native, not the friar, to ensure strict and absolute compliance. The overall impact of these prescriptions is a directive asking natives to turn away from the body, treating it as both a site of temptation and deliverance. Even though the directive involved practices that required bodily adjustments, the spirit of it is that the body is a temporal vessel of both sin and the possibility of salvation. It dictates the proper use of ones senses inasmuch as the senses are naturally inclined towards sin and misbehaviour. For such, only a certain form of penance, one that is painful to the body, can provide adequate redress. In this sense, the body itself was the site which presented an opportunity to access the divine. Indeed, Christs own corporeality facilitated the deliverance of man from his own destruction. However, as the Lagda demonstrates, the body was also a vassal of sin which had to be isolated and regulated from temptation. The rituals of intimacy promoted through the use of manuals of urbanity aimed not so much at the cultivation of secular, modern citizens, as though attempting to foster mirror images of European urbanity, rather the aim of the manuals was to produce medieval Christian bodies disciplined in spirit and physique. Urbanity in this respect is a misnomer. The native body was contorted
154

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

towards a turning away from the world or a turning away from the body itself in preparation for an afterlife defined by an ethereal (not corporeal) existence. So in a way it did not matter so much that the native body was initially refined and clean, as observed by early Spanish observers. For this kind of native cleanliness was not mediated by Christian shame and moral subservience. It was a flamboyant, irreverent and even lascivious kind of cleanliness which transgressed the expectations and norms of medieval Christian piety. The reformatting of the Filipino body, therefore, was one of a spiritual not corporeal state. While the manuals maintained their prevelance and currency throughout the Spanish colonial regime, by the nineteenth century the world of the Catholic rituals of piety was beginning to unravel. This came in the context of the rise of an increasingly cosmopolitan local elite called ilustrados, many of whom were the direct beneficiaries of the colonys participation in global capitalism. It is among the financially empowered ilustrado class, versed in both Spanish and local vernaculars, that the nationalist movement against the Spanish regime gained increasing momentum. Manuals such as the Lagda and Tagubilin were common enough to attract parody from such nationalists as Marcelo H. del Pilar, who himself published a number of Tagalog pamphlets ridiculing friars and attempting to foster mistrust of them. One such example of this was the enumeration of the Commandments of the Friar:
The Commandments of the Friar are ten: 1. Worship the friar above all things 2. Do not be so rash as to cheat him of what are called his fees 3. Celebrate a feast to the friar on Sundays and Holydays 4. Give your body as security for the costs of burial of your father and mother 5. Do not die if you do not have enough money to pay for the funeral 6. Do not commit adultery with his wife 7. Do not share in his stealing 8. Do not accuse them even if you are made out to be a liar 9. Do not refuse him your wife 10. Do not refuse him your goods

To an extent, this usurpation of the manner and form of the Lagda was an indictment on the native himself who had been, for over three centuries, so utterly consumed by the directives of the Catholic manuals of urbanity. But more importantly, parodies such as these underscored the eroding legitimacy of the friars by making explicit their abuse of power and authority. Anti-clericalism was a sentiment that defined and propelled the spirit of anti-colonial movements at the turn of the century. It also laid the foundations for the establishment of the Philippine Independent Church which was to significantly undermine the legitimacy of the Catholic Church throughout the Philippines. Instrumental, as they were in fostering the docility of native bodies, Spanish friars had to eventually face the prospect of the manuals turned against them by the colonial subjects they had sought to guide. Ironically, it was the ilustrado class
155

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

attainment of a kind of European urbanity that led to the conditions in which the very legitimacy of friar authority came to be challenged and eroded. It can be argued however that ilustrado anti-clericalism did not become fully consummated with the onset of the American regime. While seeking secular reform, if not outright independence, the propaganda movement was articulated in terms that politicized the friars defilement of the Filipino body (specifically the female body). The novels of nationalist Jose Rizal were poignant precisely because they were about the abuse of the native body, such that Spanish transgressions became a metonymy for the rape of the Filipino nation, articulated in feminized terms. Filipino anti-colonial and anti-friar sentiment alone, however, did not result in the defeat of the Spanish regime. In 1898, American colonialism, which came in to force after the ceding of the archipelago, denied the full consummation of the nationalist movement against Spain. But while the Church undoubtedly played a huge role in the development of Filipino identity, what happens when the Church no longer becomes the sole arbiter of the day-to-day lives of natives? It will be seen in the next section of this paper that the American Way of contorting the Filipino body differed in some important respects from the Spanish. The point this paper will make at this juncture is that the transition between colonial notions of the Filipino body was not sudden and abrupt. It was, rather, mediated by the nationalist movement of the nineteenth century which manifested itself in ilustrado parodies of manuals of urbanity, among other forms of nationalistic subversion. The transition between colonial regimes in the Philippines demonstrates how the medicalization of the body was associated with ideas about the moral management of Filipino bodies. Under the American mission (18991946) the body was seen as a unit that was to be administered through secular, scientific policies of personal hygiene, bacteriology, public health and sanitization. At the forefront of this endeavour were American doctors, health workers and colonial officials who largely believed that their own medical ideas and practices were immediately transplantable to the tropical colony. As the need for rationalization and legitimization of Empire went along with the need to promote and maintain health in the colony, colonial medical officials had to grapple with local realities and either fit them or adjust them not only to their own informed medical views but also to the bigger project of colonial state building and governance. What Turner observes as a general trend in Western history can be observed in the Philippine case: Put simply, the doctor has replaced the priest as the custodian of social values; the panoply of ecclesiastical institutions of regulation (the ritual order of sacraments, the places of vocational training, the hospice for pilgrims, places of worship and sanctuary) have been transferred through the evolution of scientific medicine to a panoptic collection of localized agencies of surveillance and control (Turner 1987: 37-38). We may ask at this juncture, however, why it would be the American doctor and not the American Protestant missionary who would take the role of the
156

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

Spanish friar? In this paper, we argue that the doctor was in some respects in a better position than the Protestant Missionary considering the nature of the latters relationship with the Spanish clergy towards the turn of the twentieth century. This is to say the tenacity of the Catholic hierarchy in the Philippines undermined the position of the Protestant mission as arbiters of rituals of piety in ways that did not extend to medical health practitioners. In the end, Protestant effort was generally unsuccessful in the Philippines, having converted only 1.3 per cent of the population (Shirley 2004: 39). There was also something specific about Protestantism for example, that it did not inspire awe and its ceremonies did not focus on colourful festivity that undermined its position against that of Catholicism, in which such activities were at least tolerated. Doctors and colonial health administrators promoted sensibilities that did not, at least on the surface, conflict with the strictly religious or doctrinal directives of the Catholic faith. In other words, it was in the very secularity of the medical arena, represented strongly by field medics and sanitary officials, that American colonialism gained ground on regulating social values and forms of piety. It is to this that we shall now turn.

A New Order
When American forces entered Manila they were not only faced with the prospect of being an emerging colonial empire with an outpost in the Pacific. What struck them were the conditions in the Philippine capital after they entered it in August 1898. Crowded with refugees, Manila suffered from critical food and water shortages. Garbage that had accumulated during its siege littered the streets, which were already flooded for lack of drainage. Lepers were roaming the streets, begging in the markets, or earning a living, which included the handling of foodstuffs in grocery stores Victor Heiser 1988: 169). Reeling from the aftermath of the Spanish defeat, about five thousand Spanish soldiers were interred in Manila hospitals (Foreman 1890: 540, 621). As the Philippine capital became an open territory, emigrants from all parts of the world flocked thither like flies in search of honey (De Bevoise 1995: 41). According to Ken de Bevoise, when the United States troops entered Manila prostitutes from every corner of the earth literally raced the Army. The Manila Times announced the arrival of dentists, doctors, lawyers, excursion directors, barkeepers, commercial agents, comic-opera troupes, hustlers, prospectors, and missionaries (7, 13 June; 3 August; and 28 September 1899; See also De Bevoise 1995: 41). Overnight, Manila was transformed into a circus. Burton Hendrick of the New Haven Morning News relates how the Americans witnessed the insane roaming freely because Manila had no asylums for them. According to him, mental patients were tied to posts and poles under nipa houses, or the traditional Filipino houses, which also served the purpose of housing domesticated animals such as chickens, dogs, and pigs (United States National
157

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

Archives Records Administration, Bureau of Insular Affairs Record Group 350, Entry 95, Folder 3465-A). Hendrick also describes the lack of proper burial places so that osorios or bone piles that Filipinos sometimes kept as souvenir items were scattered all over, because the living relatives of those who were dead were not able to pay the rent for the sepulchres (Ibid: 718. See also Heiser 1988: 113). The health problems that confronted the American colonial government during this time were mostly sanitation problems and epidemic diseases (United States Philippine Commission Vol.1 Part 2 1999-1903: 310). In the early reports of the Philippine Commission, these health problems were classified as those: a) common to temperate countries such as bubonic plague, cholera, leprosy, and smallpox; and b) common to tropical countries such as beriberi, diarrhoea and malaria (Ibid. 1900-1903: 310). The state of public health conditions in the Philippines shocked American colonial officials. Victor Heiser, Commissioner of the Board of Health, referring to the free movement of diseased individuals, described how the attitude of the Filipino public fluctuated between a great horror of it, amounting almost to panic, and the greatest callousness (Heiser 1988: 37). Dean Worcester, former member of the Philippine Commission appointed by President McKinley to investigate the general conditions in the Philippine Islands, and eventually Secretary of the Interior, expressed his disgust, describing such conditions as shocking in the extreme (Ibid. 1988: 9). As the Americans grappled with the organizational and logistical requirements of the PhilippineAmerican War, and the anti-imperialist debate in the United States, the public health conditions in the country presented a means to justify Americas imperialist venture. At the height of Western colonialism in the twentieth century, medicine became an essential part of the self-image of civilizing imperialism and a significant ideology that justified empire (Amrith 2006: 8). David Arnold (1988: 1-26), for instance, argues that Western medicine enabled British colonial rule to regulate its Indian subjects through the demonstration of its superiority over local knowledge and medical practices in terms of controlling epidemic disease, such as cholera. Megan Vaughan in her study of colonial Africa shows how medicine and its associated disciplines constructed the African as an object of knowledge (Vaughan 1991: 8). In the case of the Philippines, the conception and establishment of American medicine and public health became a means that was intended to erase the doubts that divided the American nation. Born in the midst of the brutalities of the PhilippineAmerican War and the anti-imperialist debate in the United States, the American colonial public health system was made to serve Americas civilizing mission (See Anderson 2006: 2). Reynaldo Ileto in his article Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines, for example, also shows the military origins of American medicine and public health and how the image of the conquering soldier soon became transformed into that of the crusading sanitary inspector (Lowe and Lloyd 1997: 110. See also Anderson 2006: 2). According to Ileto, the
158

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

perceived blessing of public health, in particular the American campaigns against cholera in the years 18991901, were in fact continuing acts of war meant to subdue Filipino revolutionary troops (Ileto 1988: 127). Nevertheless, the rhetoric of civilizing mission sanctioned a re-ordering of Filipino lives in terms of new hygiene and health practices. It also promoted a new set of habits and values that were largely played out in the barrios (small villages of initially about 50100 families), or local villages which became secular laboratories of modernity (Stoler and Cooper 1997: 45). Propagated through the public school system as the main purveyor of the new gospel of public health, set bodily regimes incorporated into everyday life supplanted the church and religious instruction which were the main focus in the Philippines during Spanish colonial times. Caught in organizational concerns as well as competing ideologies of different interest groups, the diffusion of American medical beliefs, practices, and discourse became a means for the expanding American bureaucracy in the Philippines to regulate and discipline the bodies of their Filipino subjects.

The Gospel of Public Health


Towards the end of the nineteenth century significant developments in modern medicine and public health were achieved. David Arnold for instance, identifies Edward Jenners discovery of the smallpox vaccine in 1790 as the first signal of mans potential to master disease (Arnold 1988: 12). J.Z. Bowers adds that the smallpox vaccine was a European feat that was successfully brought to and implemented in European colonies (Bowers 1981: 1733. See also Arnold 1988: 12). This helped bolster European notions of cultural and technological superiority. Philip Curtin, in the meantime, cites the germ theory of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur towards the late nineteenth century as having revolutionized medicine. According to him, the germ theory also encouraged the systematic collection and dissemination of knowledge in the area of health (Curtin 1989: 104). By the nineteenth century, the principal focus of medicine and public health was preventative action through sanitation. Both in the metropolis and in the colonies, governments endeavoured to provide potable water as well as eliminate foul odours from sewage and refuse, which were considered important factors that caused epidemics. Manuals were also written which offered practical advice not only on how to be healthy but also on how to preserve health and survive in the tropics, with an emphasis on public and later on private hygiene. These manuals held out the promise of surviving a foreign environment and the hope of living a good life in the tropics. Seeing the tropical environment as one of the most daunting in European colonizing efforts, Professor of Hygiene J. Lane Notter, noted:
The climate of a country has a most important influence on the health and character of its inhabitants. It therefore requires careful study by those who, having previously
159

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

lived in temperate zones, are suddenly transferred to a tropical country: and whose very change of environment necessitates a perfect knowledge of many rules and precautions, if they desire to maintain a standard of health at all commensurate with what they naturally expect to enjoy at home: as well as to ward off those diseases, the result of deteriorations of the functions of the body, which are the effect produced by long residence in tropical countries. (Curtin 1989: 104)

James Johnsons Influences of Tropical Climates on European Constitution, published in 1813, became the first manual of its kind for the British colony of India and underwent several editions until 1861. The years beginning 1861 to 1903 witnessed a spate of publications that offered advice on how individuals could protect their lives. Henry Kings The Madras Manual of Hygiene, published in 1875, for example, specifically details the ways in which the health of Europeans could be preserved in the Madras Presidency. Almost two decades later William Ewing Grants The Indian Manual of Hygiene superseded Kings in terms of scope and detail. Curtin explains how Grants work covered a range of information intended to survive the tropics such as domestic architecture, ventilation, nutrition, as well as the design of a modern sewage system (Curtin 1989: 104). While these works became standard guides on living in the tropics, however, these works are primarily concerned with the health and welfare of the Europeans in their various colonies. David Arnold, for example, reproduces a colonial officials letter to the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore towards the end of the nineteenth century which provides an insight into how colonial officials actually viewed the local peoples health:
Why on earth should we go on spending scores of rupees on a thankless task Let the natives have the advice and attendance of their professional hakims and be happy and contented, and when the plague has killed half the population of India and spent itself, then perhaps the native will perceive [sic] the force of the saying: Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat [Those whom God has a mind to destroy, He first deprives of their senses]. (Arnold 1988: 156)

Meanwhile, in nineteenth century Batavia, there were no colonial initiatives to improve the living conditions of the Batavians. Norman Owen relates how colonial suburbs were established with their own conveniently located artesian wells without access for the local population (Owen 1987: 201). Conditions in the Philippines were quite similar when the Spaniards established their own enclaves or ciudades Espanoles. As in other colonial states, it was only when health became entwined with a utilitarian logic of labour productivity and commercial success that colonial governments started to pay attention to the health of the local population. According to Warwick Anderson: Native bodies were increasingly recognized not simply as the body of the Other, but more importantly perhaps, as the body of the worker, or the body of the future workers
160

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

mother. These were bodies to be studied, surveyed, disciplined and, when necessary, reformed to ensure their efficiency as parts of the emerging world system (Anderson 2000, quoted in Cooter and Pickstone 2000: 23545. See also Amrith 2006: 9). In the case of the Philippines the American colonial public health system not only secured health in the colony for economic purposes. Glossed in imperial rhetoric as a civilizing mission, it allowed the Americans to secure colonial rule through the creation and establishment of varied social relations, institutions, and bodies. At the forefront of this endeavour were American doctors, scientists, and public health officials who largely believed that they could transport their own medical ideas and practices to the colony. As the need for rationalization and legitimization of empire went along with the need to promote and maintain health in the colony, colonial medical officials had to grapple with local realities and either fit them or adjust them not only to their own informed medical views but also to the bigger project of colonial state building and governance. Therefore, the imposition of new ways of life in response to state health regulations as part of government service were actually meant to shape a people and landscape Filipino bodies and their geographical space in order to reduce what colonial personnel saw as the colonys chaotic, disorderly, and constantly changing social reality into colonial visions of order. This becomes more significant as the American occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century came at a time when significant development in modern medicine and public health came into being. Most Filipinos, from the general perception of the Americans, lacked education and were naturally suspicious and sceptical as to the efforts of the Board of Health. In particular, according to E.C. Carter, Commissioner of Public Health in 1902, the greatest obstacle to improving the conditions of the native was the native himself (E.C. Carter 1905: 65). Americans also generally believed that the unsanitary habits of the majority of the population could be traced to a certain extent to racial customs and the attainment of a lower degree of civilization, although they also considered the pathogenic environment of the Philippines. Racial habits, according to the Americans, however, could not be immediately done away with, even under the best of conditions; but it was possible to gradually modify and improve them through education of the younger generation. Instructions to all primary schools were then mandated to include elementary principles of personal hygiene, house sanitation, and the causes of, and measures for the prevention of, transmissible disease (Ibid 1905: 74). In describing the early efforts to promote public health, for instance, Victor Heiser, Director of Health from 1905 to 1915, remarked, the ultimate success of health work in the Philippines would depend upon the degree of education of the masses and that the best hope there lies in a sound school health program (Victor Heiser 1930: RG1.1, ser.242, box 1, folder 8, RAC). Teachers, for example, compiled a health-index for every child in their class: a healthy child would
161

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

possess a well-formed body, clean and shining hair, a clear skin of good colour, ears free from discharge, a voice of pleasant quality, and an amiable disposition (Bureau of Education and Philippine Health Service 1928: n.p.), among others. More elaborately, the instructions of the Bureau of Education on how to be healthy prescribed that: Every child must be weighed once a month with height measured at least twice a year, and (ibid.: n.p.) goes on to note:
If anything was amiss the teacher was expected to report it to the local health officer. It was also the duty of the teacher to instruct pupils to care for themselves and to put into practice both in the school and at home miscellaneous health principles Children must be taught of the dangers of raw vegetables, impure water, poorly ventilated houses, a sedentary way of life, and deformed posture. Every child was enjoined to carry a clean handkerchief, drink at least a cup of milk every day, sleep between 10 and 12 hours each night (under a mosquito net), bathe daily, wear shoes, wash hands before eating, never touch food and defecate fastidiously. The construction of a toilet, either in his own home or that of a neighbour, should be a project for each seventh-grade boy. (ibid)

Compliance with the standards and requirements of the state and medical authorities popularized through the educational system prescribed the means for a person to be healthy, and the inability to meet these health standards could render one unhealthy. Since it was also perceived that it was impossible to change the way parents reared their children according to how American medical officials thought they should be reared, domestic science subjects were incorporated into the school curriculum, because in educating the school children, the educational system, in the larger sense, was also educating prospective parents. Domestic science skills were incorporated into the curriculum of all-girls schools under Home Economics, which included cooking, laundry, sewing, weaving, needlework, housewifery (sweeping, dusting, etc.), and specific issues of infant care. Interest in domestic science education and its function in training young women as wives and mothers coincided also with a wider interest in hygiene, sanitation and education. For example, the construction of latrines were part of school projects and their success was later on attributed to school children who encouraged their use among their parents. In being able to comply with these new doctrines of health and hygiene, Filipinos were made to conform to a totally different lifestyle, one that colonial medical officials sanctioned. What the Americans emphasized, in a sense, was behavioural reform, which also meant that they became compliant, docile, and manageable subjects. In the final analysis, an exploration of the Filipino body in this context allows us to look beyond basic state activities such as health initiatives and public welfare and health campaigns. More importantly, it allows us to look into how these state activities were actually the ways and means by which the colonial regime attempted to extend its reach, as American colonial officials sought to undertake colonial state building and governance.
162

The Colonial Medicalization of the Filipino Body

From Sacred to the Sanitary: The Transition of the Filipino Body


The contribution of this paper to the discussion of the Filipino body has been to analyse how the agencies of colonial regulation manifested in the minutiae of social life. This process can be seen by juxtaposing Spanish manuals of religious piety with American directives of public health and hygiene which, as we have seen, had also been deployed through the use of manuals and gazettes that promoted the gospel of sanitization. The relationship between code, practice and embodiment that is a central theme in this volume finds strong expression in the Philippine example. As a few other chapters in this volume demonstrate, the features of the colonial Filipino body can be seen through the codes both religious and civic that sought to contort its form, dictate its movement and regulate its habits. There are, in this respect, some general comparative statements that can be made. Through manuals of urbanity, the Spanish missionaries geared the native population towards the anticipation of a heavenly afterlife, while American health policy geared native bodies towards this-worldly notions of health, which were, in turn, motivated by the fear of death and physical contamination. American medical practitioners suggested that all native bodies could achieve the common ideal of bodily wellness if they observed certain rituals and submitted to the formers medical and physiological expertise. The body under the Spanish regime, on the other hand, was not subjected to this kind rhetoric of equality. Instead, people were taught to align their sensibilities towards an ideal that could only be achieved when they died. For there was an inherent irony in Christian notions concerning the body that the rewards of the physical and spiritual upkeep of ones body could only be attained when the body itself expired. The rewards of religious piety, therefore, were ones that were perpetually deferred and subject to the doctrines of Christian soteriology. Aside from divergences between colonial regimes, some intersections can also be traced. Both regimes crafted their religious/ideological systems according to physical segregations and population control. In other words, both Spanish and American notions of the native body became manifested in physical geography. Ideas about the condition of the native body determined the geographical boundaries that demarcated settlement patterns. For the Spanish, the policy of reduccion alienated those who were not of sound mind, body and spirit. As an attempt to define correct religious behaviour, Manuals of Urbanity had the effect of domesticating aspects of a persons character and comportment that did not correspond to doctrinal ideals. Those who resisted the civilizing/Christianizing mission of the colonial enterprise were relegated to the peripheries and the margins of civilized society. For the Americans, the sanitary barrio segregated those who were deemed uncontaminated or clean. But also, those outside American settlement patterns were those recalcitrant to the civilizing/sanitizing mission. This suggests that rituals of intimacy in both regimes were, in practice,
163

Julius Bautista and Ma Mercedes Planta

exclusionary measures that created and demarcated physical space for the purpose of defining circles of intimates and outsiders. While this paper has touched upon how this transition between regimes was mediated by the nationalist movement, its main thrust has been to invite discussion on ways in which this gradual process of transition can be seen in the regimes of intimacy Filipino bodies were made to observe. This paper has considered how the medicalization of the body a European phenomenon since the thirteenth century has found two distinct forms of expression as a specifically colonial project in South-East Asia. It is conceptualized as a foray into a broader analysis of the Filipino body within the ideological milieu of colonialism by describing the colonial Filipino body in a state of flux across hegemonic regimes.

164

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi