ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Foods that Sicken, Foods that Heal: Exploring Colonial Narratives of Food and Illness in the Early Modern Mariana Islands (Northwestern Pacific)

• In Event: The Science and Medicine of Habits I: Habits, the Body and Space

English Abstract

While European medical ideas regarding bodily habits were central to colonial projects, the variety of ways in which colonial narratives of nutrition and disease were employed to exert control over Indigenous populations remain underexplored. This study examines colonial discourses surrounding the Indigenous body, specifically focusing on nutrition and disease within the isolated context of the Mariana Islands. We investigate how Jesuit missionaries, active between 1668 and 1769, theorised the declining Indigenous CHamoru population through the lens of their eating habits and illnesses. This paper analyses the specific colonial actions and strategies aimed at controlling the Indigenous body that derived from these medical and theological ideas. Our approach contrasts two distinct universes of nutritional meaning: Indigenous Micronesian traditional wisdom regarding food and health, and the Galenic understanding of nutrition and healing brought by the Jesuits. We combine CHamoru knowledge with an extensive analysis of late 17th and 18th-century colonial sources (primarily missionary accounts) located in archives across the Americas, the Pacific, and Europe. We examine discourses surrounding foodways (what, how, and where food is consumed) and colonial aetiological ideas towards sickness, such that it derives from the consumption of inadequate food or directly from God, reflecting a divine sign or an opportunity for virtuous sacrifice. We show that early modern medical and nutritional ideas in the colonial Marianas were used as tools of conversion and control. The research highlights how bodily habits played a key role in missionary strategies and demonstrates how theological-medical discourse changed to meet economic colonial imperatives.

Authors

• Matilde Carbajo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

• Verónica Peña Filiu, Independent Scholar