Description

In this paper, I draw on archival documents to consider the “birth of the clinic” in the U.S. occupied Philippines, with the clinic here being understood as a puericulture centres (i.e. centres for the care of young children) and their personnel. Foucault’s (1994) account of the birth of the clinic focuses on the development of la clinique, understood both as clinical medicine and teaching hospital, the shared characteristic of each of which is the examination and discussion of actual cases. He describes the birth of practices, and the birth of new ways of seeing; both lead to constructing something previously invisible as visible. In English, however, clinic has an additional definition, as a facility for diagnosis and treating outpatients. Here I consider the ways that the birth of the outpatient clinic led to a form of “visibility” for Filipino families, as state knowledge and surveillance of family practices increased. But the focus on clinics, and social medicine, could also be seen as a critique, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, of the focus of American biomedicine on scientific research and contagious disease. In addition, I consider the ways that initiatives addressing maternal and child health (MCH) in local puericulture clinics became a mechanism for the demographic inscription of Filipinos into the colonial and protonational state, one which was nonetheless a contested extension of state surveillance and power into the intimate politics of family life. The Philippines is compared to and contextualized within a rich, recent literature on interventions into domestic life, especially through maternal and child health, in European and American national and colonial settings (Boddy 1998, 2007; Briggs 2005; Hunt 1999; Hattori 2004; Jones 2002; Jolly 1998b; Manderson 1998; Turrittin 2002). This essay thus joins a recent set of essays (Go and Foster 2005) which argue that scholars need to analyze the U.S. colonial state in the Philippines from a global perspective, not to affirm or deny whether the U.S. colonial occupation was more benign than others (the well-worn “exceptionalist” argument), but rather “to appropriate critically the global perspective that exceptionalist reasoning necessarily entails” (Go 2005:3).

Bonnie McElhinny is Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her SSHRC-funded research focuses on historical and contemporary investigations of North American interventions into Filipino health care and childcare practices, and reactions and resistance to these. Her current work includes an investigation into early 20th century attempts to address high infant mortality rates in the Philippines during the American colonial occupation, as a case study in imperial attempts to restructure affect and intimacy, and the ways debates about children were used as a terrain for imperial and nationalist arguments. McElhinny is also the founding co-editor of the journal Gender and Language, and has recently written a number of theoretical papers on the role of language in an era of globalization, corporatization and neoliberalization. Recent and representative publications on these topics include: (1) Words, Worlds, Material Girls: Language and Gender in a Global Economy (2007); (2) “’Kissing a Baby is Not At All Good For Him’: Infant Mortality, Medicine and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines” American Anthropologist (2005); (3) “Prétextes de L’Empire Américain aux Philippines: Recontextualisation des Histoires de la Médecine Impériale” Anthropologie et Sociétés; (2007); (4) Bonnie McElhinny, Shirley Yeung, Valerie Damasco, Angela DeOcampo, Monina Febria, Christianne Collantes, and Jason Salonga “Talk about Luck”: Coherence, Contingency, Character and Class in the Life Stories of Filipino Canadians in Toronto. Language and Asia-Pacific Americans, edited by Adrienne Lo and Angela Reyes. Oxford University Press (2009); and (5) Producing the A-1 Baby: Puericulture Centres and the Birth of the Clinic in the U.S. Occupied Philippines 1906-1946. Philippine Studies Special Issue on Public Health in the Twentieth Century Philippines.