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Counting Colonial Calories: Nutrition, Bodies, and Diseases on the Rubber Plantations of French Colonial Vietnam

Fri, March 17, 3:00 to 5:00pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 4th Floor, Forest Hill

Abstract

This paper explores the ways that the relationship of Vietnamese laboring bodies to food and disease on rubber plantations became a site of colonial contestation. It asks how new understandings of food, in particular scientific measures of nutrition such as calories and vitamins, affected the lives of workers. During the early twentieth century, colonial officials, medical doctors, planters, and laborers debated the role of nutrition in causing death and disease on rubber plantations. Archives of the labor inspectorate in Cochinchina and medical articles on nutrition show the importance of nutritional science in mediating employer and employee relations. These records show that vitamin deficiency diseases such as beriberi, combined with malaria, were among the biggest killers of workers. When planters were accused of underfeeding Vietnamese laborers, they mobilized calorie counts to argue that they supplied enough food. Planters tried to blame the workers' own bad habits, notably gambling, for their ill health. In this way, planters wielded medical expertise to deflect workers' political demands, a strategy carried forward into the postcolonial era. For their part, medical doctors and government officials played an ambivalent role in this process. While some doctors and officials pointed to the problems of poverty, they largely accepted the planters' arguments. In other words, they placed the Vietnamese body within its natural environment and isolated it from its social environment. Meanwhile, workers' bodily experience of oppression provided alternative sources of knowledge and during moments of conflict, laborers drew on this experience to reject planters' claims.

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