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The Discourse and Praxis of Medicine, Hygiene, and Body in Colonial Morocco
Abstract
In this dissertation I will investigate the colonial encounter between Morocco and France from 1880 until 1962 through a history of the (physical) body. The goal of this research is to place meanings and practices of "medicine", "hygiene" and "body" at the center of Moroccan experiences of modernity. Colonialism instrumentalized medicine and hygiene for colonial projects in various ways: curing, civilizing, controlling populations and declaring the "demise" of their ill bodies and their rebirth in modern and medicalized bodies. The national discourse, which contested colonial medical discourse, adopted the latter because it proved to be efficient in conquering the social body by achieving a monopoly over the physical human individual body. In this dissertation I will show how the meanings and praxis of "medicine", "hygiene", and body" shifted away from Moroccan cosmology and moved to compass sate power, scientific progress, national identity, class conscience; when the concept of cleanness and care of the body moved from the intimate and privy to political and national, when having a bath in the hammam or cleaning one's body under a modern shower became a political act . The present research will attempt to deconstruct the monolith of "Western medicine" and capture its transformation and multiple manifestations in the context of colonial modernity, in order to reveal moments of ambivalence of the national elite, who from one hand they challenged and reformulated what they perceived as the errors and limits of Western medicine, and on they other hand they adopted the colonial medical discourse and incorporated in the curriculum of the new Nation Medical School of the independent state while keeping distance from traditional modes of healing giving up by this act a colonial attempt to incorporate tractional Moroccan medical practises in colonial hospitals in treating not only the local people but also the Europeans who lived their. This research aims to show how the encounter of colonial medicine with local traditional medical healing practices (re)shaped the modern Moroccan (fleshy) body as we know it today.
Discipline
Medicine/Health
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries