"Kissing a Baby Is Not at All Good for Him": Infant Mortality, Medicine, and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines |
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Authors: | BONNIE McELHINNY |
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Institution: | Department of Anthropology and Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto ON M5S 3G3 |
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Abstract: | Feminist scholars have begun to consider the ways indigenous practices of child rearing were and are challenged in (post)colonial discourse and practice, and how these practices have become a terrain on which definitions of nation, state, and economy are contested. In this article, I adopt a historical anthropological approach to consider how Filipino child-rearing strategies were described and stigmatized in educational, public health, and public welfare discourses in the U.S.-occupied Philippines in the early 20th century. I demonstrate how public health practices and discourses that were generated as part of a "benevolent" campaign against high rates of infant mortality were strategically used as a weapon against Filipino arguments for independence. I also consider how discourses constructing Filipino caregivers as overly indulgent were linked to metropolitan concerns about production of the "new industrial man" and were used to develop a racialized critique of the cultural practices of Filipinos. |
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Keywords: | infant mortality imperial medicine the Philippines child rearing U S imperialism |
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