Cartographic Anxieties: Mapping Animals, Health, and the Philippine Question

Abstract

This paper examines the mapping of animal spaces as a constitutive exercise in establishing modern health and addressing colonial anxieties in the early-twentieth-century American Philippines. Focusing on an 1899 medical report by the Johns Hopkins University Special Commission of the Prevalent Diseases in the Philippines and a 1909 US medical survey of the town of Taytay in southern Luzon, the paper considers colonial efforts to map the connections between animal locales, including forested areas, farmlands, and public markets. In this manner, mapping animal sites brought to the fore the study of health, disease, and hygiene as a responsibility of the colonial state. At the same time, the mapping of these spaces belongs to a greater context known as “The Philippine Question”, when the status of the country was placed under scrutiny after its acquisition by the United States in 1898. Drawing primarily on these studies, the argument is made that mapping animal sites produced knowledge about the health conditions of these spaces, and at the same time, formed new anxieties. Although the production of animal geographies and associated cartographic practices have tended to be sidelined in colonial histories, the paper suggests that they were in fact central to an emergent twentieth-century colonial governmentality that increasingly focused on reading across and between sites at different scales: local, provincial, colonial, and imperial.