Sometime in the early 1990s, several historians of empire in South Asia and the Philippines became interested in studying how colonialism might be variously embodied and manifested in mundane social relations and physical contact. Many of them were rebelling against what appeared to be the meager textualism in many critiques of colonial discourse, which were then popular. As a historian of public health in the colonial Philippines, aware that in effect all medicine is colonial in relation to the bodies of patients, this reviewer wanted particularly to explore how disciplines of hygiene and sanitation, oriented around racist fears of pollution and defilement, might have worked to reshape bodies and sensibilities in the archipelago under the United States’ regime. Many materialist historians of South Asia, including Arnold, were drawing inspiration from what are now the usual suspects—Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, Alain Corbin, Norbert Elias, and Mary Douglas, among others.1...

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