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132. Putting Bodies to Work: New Directions in the History of Colonial Medicine in Southeast Asia

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The history of medicine and science is one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing fields in
Southeast Asian history. Scholars of the colonial period, for instance, have explored the local
production of medical knowledge across cultures, traced the movements of knowledge within emerging international scientific networks and studied the role of medicine in the construction of nationalist narratives and postcolonial state building projects.

This panel focuses on the history of the body in colonial Southeast Asia in order to show how far ideas about biology and disease traveled outside of expert medical circles. On topics ranging from nutrition to mental illness, from French Indochina to the Dutch East Indies, the authors seek to understand how the body came to be understood as “normal” and “abnormal” and served as the basis for the articulation of a new kind of religious ethics and a new kind of colonial subject.

Attempts to regulate the plantation economy and sex industry also demonstrate how the body emerged as a site for making claims on the state for heightened protection and, in some instances,
evading state control. In particular, these four papers examine how the body was inserted into various regimes of power that cut across presumed distinctions between mind and body, religion and science, sex and labor, society and the environment. Together they seek to expand the archive on the history of medicine by showing how the bodies of men and women were understood across
multiple fields of knowledge and experience.

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