TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 113
Empire.^68 I want to suggest the term "colonial burnout" for this set of
symptoms. However spurious its medical credentials may be,
"Phillippinitis,"likethemoredramaticanddangerousepidemicssuchas
Ebola or HIV-AIDS, can be read as "figure of interruption" (Paul
Giles)^69 which undermined the colonialist binary by pitting the superior
Westerner against the (medically) inferior native. Major Charles E.
Woodruff, himself a medical man, describes his tour of duty in the
Philippines as characterized by "overwork, vicious conduct, and the
thousands of things which lower [male] vitality." His conclusion was:
"[L]ow tropical savages are the fittest for their environment, and the
strenuous[!]whitemanistheunfit"(qtd.inW.Anderson138;emphasis
added).Astheresignedtoneofthis notemayshow,imperialexpansion
remained pretty much an incomplete project, incomplete because here,
mastery of the local disease ecology required abilities totally different
than those on which the usual forms of military and political mastery
depended.ThepsychicstrainsfeltbyU.S.officialsandwhichregistered
in "Philippinitis" were of course not as serious as infectious diseases
such as yellow fever or leprosy. Nonetheless, they were, as many
sources from that period show, infectious in a metaphorical sense:
expressions of a group feeling, perhaps even of group solidarity,
resultingfromtheexperienceofastressfuldiseaseecology.
Evenwhile thedaysareoverwhenbiologicalthreatsin thecolonies
marked "the white man's grave," intractable local ecologies continue to
(^68) MurrayandSchallerhaverecentlypointedoutthatnarrativesoftheinfectious
and debilitating landscapes of the EuroAmerican colonies rely on a stable
arsenal of geo-cultural arguments (temperate zones are best) (cf. Murray and
Schaller103).
(^69) Gilescoinedthisphraseinadifferentbutrelatedcontext.Inhisreflectionson
re-conceptualizations of American Studies, especially in an international
framework, he attributed to Paul Gilroy and other British Cultural Studies
practitionersanunderstandingoftheUnitedStates"asafigureofinterruption,a
means of disturbing any 'narrowly ethnic definition of racial authenticity' or the
'purity of cultures' on either side of the Atlantic" (540). My use of the phrase is
likewisedesignedtohighlighthowpresumablyneatandtightdistinctions,inmy
case that between the "civilized American" and the "backward native," can be
subverted,thistimebytheinterventionofbio-medicalprocesses.