Arnold's Colonizing the body
Arnold, D. 1993. Colonizing the body
Explaining ‘colonization of the body’ Arnold noted that medicine was but one, albeit critical aspect of colonial processes in India. “Its equivalents are to be found across a whole range of interlocking colonial discourses, sites, and practices: from penology to anthropology, from the army to the plantation and the factory” (p. 8). The point he tried to make is that medicine occupied “a place within a more expansionist ideological order and a wider empirical domains (p. 8).
In explicating this thesis of colonization of the body, Arnold gives a vivid definition of colonization as built of “an enormous battery of texts and discursive practices that concerned themselves with the physical being of the colonized (and no less critically, though the interconnection is too seldom recognized, of the colonizer implanted in their midst” (p. 8). Arnold in this work also tries to discuss under the rubrics of ‘colonization of the body’ the diverse array of ideological and administrative mechanism by which an emerging system of knowledge and power extended itself into and over India’s indigenous society. He compares this with bourgeois society and modern states elsewhere in the world (p. 9). What he meant however is that ‘bodies were being connoted and categorized, they were being disciplined, discoursed, in India much as they were in Britain, France, or the United States at that time. In this sense, “all modern medicine is engaged in a colonizing process” (p. 9).
With regard to the relationship between western medicine and Indian medicine, Arnold is in favor of looking at it in pluralistic and dialectical terms. In his view, this is to move away from the purely metropolitan view of an expansionist science and to appreciate the external to which western medicine in India was not merely a projection of the medicine taught and practiced in Britain but was constantly engaged in a dialogue with India or, at least within an “Orientalist” version of what India its climate, its peoples, its culture represented.
Hence is Arnold’s dialogical approach to history society and cultures.
Explaining ‘colonization of the body’ Arnold noted that medicine was but one, albeit critical aspect of colonial processes in India. “Its equivalents are to be found across a whole range of interlocking colonial discourses, sites, and practices: from penology to anthropology, from the army to the plantation and the factory” (p. 8). The point he tried to make is that medicine occupied “a place within a more expansionist ideological order and a wider empirical domains (p. 8).
In explicating this thesis of colonization of the body, Arnold gives a vivid definition of colonization as built of “an enormous battery of texts and discursive practices that concerned themselves with the physical being of the colonized (and no less critically, though the interconnection is too seldom recognized, of the colonizer implanted in their midst” (p. 8). Arnold in this work also tries to discuss under the rubrics of ‘colonization of the body’ the diverse array of ideological and administrative mechanism by which an emerging system of knowledge and power extended itself into and over India’s indigenous society. He compares this with bourgeois society and modern states elsewhere in the world (p. 9). What he meant however is that ‘bodies were being connoted and categorized, they were being disciplined, discoursed, in India much as they were in Britain, France, or the United States at that time. In this sense, “all modern medicine is engaged in a colonizing process” (p. 9).
With regard to the relationship between western medicine and Indian medicine, Arnold is in favor of looking at it in pluralistic and dialectical terms. In his view, this is to move away from the purely metropolitan view of an expansionist science and to appreciate the external to which western medicine in India was not merely a projection of the medicine taught and practiced in Britain but was constantly engaged in a dialogue with India or, at least within an “Orientalist” version of what India its climate, its peoples, its culture represented.
Hence is Arnold’s dialogical approach to history society and cultures.
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