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The Body and the Body Politic: Medicine, Public Health, and Healing as History in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2015

Ellen Amster*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Department of Clinical Epidemiology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; e-mail: amstere@mcmaster.ca

Extract

Medicine and healing are intertwined with history, because the body is the precondition of human sovereignty. The body is the base of the body politic.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 See Amster, Ellen J., Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

2 Comaroff, Jean, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 8Google Scholar.

3 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, excerpted in Lock, Margaret and Farquar, Judith, Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life (Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 133–47Google Scholar.

5 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (New York: Picador, 2008)Google Scholar.

6 Consider the Friedmann urine test for pregnancy, which Berber customary law courts chose to adopt in Morocco. In accepting the test, the courts eliminated the Islamic legal concept of the “sleeping fetus” (raqid), limited pregnancy to nine months, replaced the authority of Muslim midwives with French doctors, and replaced Muslim legal testimony—the truth of the soul—with a nonhuman, positive, laboratory truth extracted involuntarily from bodies. See Amster, Medicine and the Saints, chap. 5.

7 Donzelot, Jacques, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979)Google Scholar.

8 The methodological convergence of history and anthropology as a health and healing literature originates from African studies. See the work of Steven Feierman, John Janzen, Neil Kodesh, Jean Comaroff, and Vincent Crapanzano.