Domesticated Animal Geographies and the Making of Modern Public Health in the Philippines, 1860-1898

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. By the turn of the century, animals were viewed ambiguously: they were considered sources of nutrition and thus indispensable to human health, at the same time new biomedical knowledge was demonstrating their critical role in human sickness. Focusing on 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. Located at the fringes of Manila, Taytay was chosen as a site of study by the Bureau of Science since diseases like filariasis and malaria were prevalent. Published in the Philippine Journal of Science, the report not only aimed to study the nature of the diseases that resided in the bodies of the town’s inhabitants, but to inform the colonial government’s health policy. In this manner, mapping animal sites brought to the fore the study of health, disease, and hygiene as a responsibility of the colonial state. Drawing primarily on the Taytay study and on maps produced by different government agencies, the argument is made that mapping animal sites used inter-agency knowledge and interdisciplinary methods essential for the understanding of modern health. A distinctive inter-scalar spatial logic informed such colonial projects. 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. While mapping was a political activity that sought to regulate and control space, it also gave rise to new anxieties about the pervious borders that marked off animal sites and the consequences for humans of these animal proximities.