Excremental Colonialism

Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution

By Warwick Anderson

American Public Health

American public health in the Philipines immersed in the “poetics of pollution”. Medical texts contrast a “closed, ascetic American body with an open, grotesque Filipino body” (640).

• Filipinos “brownwashed” with thin film of germs

• Called for mass, ceaseless disinfection

• Filipino bodies that polluted required control and medical reform and the vulnerable, formalized bodies of American colonists required sanitary quarantine

• Lacked control of their orifices and practiced “promiscuous defacation”

• Americans should colonize and train Filipinos on hygiene and behavior

Formal Bodies/Grotesque Bodies

Americans found the towns covered with “filth of all kinds, human excrement included” and needed to “civilize” the Filipinos (646).

• Americans started a “crusade against filth.”

• Vulnerable foreigners (Americans) would be wise to treat all Filipinos as “potentially infected and dangerous.”

• Recognized the “imperative need” to control the methods of disposal of excrement among Filipino people.

• Medical reports and scientific papers described the Filipino body grotesque, unfinished, outgoing itself…[an] open body not separated by the world but blended with animals and objects.

• American colonialists imagined themselves as having the “classical body”, complete, isolated, and closed off from other bodies; represented the “civilized” model for Filipinos.

• Servants were taught to avoid handling food, setting tables and taught to dispose their wastes and wash their hands regularly.

The Laboratory and the Market

The “civilizing process” in the Philippines depended on the medical production and filling of a closed, colonial space – the reproduction of “abstract space” (651).

• Laboratories as abstract/representational space – a place of somatic control and closure, organized...