Critical Inquiry

Spring 1995

Volume 21, Number 3

Excerpt from "Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution" by Warwick Anderson:

"In reading the literature of American public health in the Phillipines, one soon becomes immersed in a poetics of pollution. Medical texts insistently contrast a closed, ascetic American body with an open, grotesque Filipino body, the former typically in charge of a sterilized laboratory or clinic, the latter squatting in an unruly, promiscuous marketplace. Reductive as it may seem, this sequence of equivalence and opposition proved remarkably pervasive and effective. American colonial health officers in the early twentieth century turned their new tropical frontier into a desolate human-waste land, imagining everything "brownwashed" with a thin film of germs. Thus constituted, the tropical environment called for massive, ceaseless disinfection; the Filipino bodies that polluted it required control and medical reformation; and the vulnerable, formalized bodies of the American colonialists demanded sanitary quarantine. (By definition, the American body was necessarily closed off, abstracted from its tropical disclocation.) This is an essay, then, on the medical production of colonial bodies and colonial space-- in other words, an essay about feces, orifices, and toilets.

The personal hygiene of Filipinos-- never much admired by ordinary Americans in the Islands-- earned more than mere aesthetic or moral disapprobation in early twentieth-century medical reports. Human wastes, the Bureau of Health warned Filipinos, "are more dangerous than arsenic or strychnine." Recent research had proven that "dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, and kindred diseases are conveyed to a person, regardless of whether he be king or peasant, with minute organisms that, probably, have passed through the bowels of another person." Accordingly, all Filipinos should learn to treat their "evacuated intestinal contents as a poison," taking care to avoid contact with them and to avoid spreading them about. Unlike Americans, Filipinos seemed to lack control of their orifices. "The native and Chinese population," lamented Dr. Wallace DeWitt, "tend markedly to increase the general unhygenic surroundings by reason of their uncleanly habits." Thus it was clear to Dr. Thomas R. Marshall, among others, that "the Filipino people, generally speaking, should be taught that... promiscuous defecation is dangerous and should be discontinued." Ideally, Americans should train Filipinos to behave as meticulously and as retentively as themselves..."

Return to Table of Contents