Native Medical Practitioners, Temporality, and Nascent Biomedical Citizenship in the New Hebrides

Abstract

While governing the New Hebrides from 1906 to 1980, a British-French Condominium hired Pacific Islanders who had been trained in Fiji as Native Medical Practitioners (NMPs), to deliver primary health care and to offer public health education to the declining indigenous population. The NMPs’ medical work was also expected to expand colonial governance in a culturally diverse archipelago with no prior centralized state. Focusing on the 1920s through the1940s, I suggest that the NMPs’ attempts to inculcate a sense of responsibility for individual health and civic involvement in their patients, as well as demands made by the NMPs themselves for civic entitlements, were forms of nascent biomedical citizenship. I propose that the practices of nascent biomedical citizenship, significant as they were, also had the potential to be exclusionary because they presumed the creation of a civic subject oriented toward a particular kind of future and a selective recuperation of the past

Rubbish sick and the dancing devil

“…In many respects, the hospital and hospital staff themselves represent the hopes—and often failures—of modernity (Widmer, 2010). The hospital strives to be a place of ordered medical regimes, as opposed to the world outside, where health‐seeking practice is, as one head nurse once put it to me in Bislama, half half olbaot (cut up and randomly scattered).…”

“…A "diagnostic odyssey" of repeated consultation, attempted diagnosis, and ambiguous treatment outcomes, the narrative depicts everything of the chaos, suffering, and loss that coexists with undiagnosed chronic illnesses in children (Carmichael et al, 2015;Spillmann et al, 2017). Such complex life challenges are further exacerbated through being embedded within a dynamic healthcare setting, one that is deeply sedimented in colonial and missionary history and moral values (Widmer, 2008a(Widmer, , 2008b(Widmer, , 2010. Across this complex terrain are entangled multiple etiological modalities and frameworks of medical knowledge, practice, and moral reasoning (Elliott & Taylor, 2021;Taylor, 2015;Vaughan, 2013).…”

Anthropology Becoming … ? The 2010 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review

“…Outside of the Cultural Anthropology essay cluster and the two other articles on which we have chosen to focus, there were many fine works probing the political, legal, and social lives and struggles of indigenous peoples throughout the world (Arndt 2010; Darian‐Smith 2010; Dussart 2010; Engle 2010; Forte 2010; Idrus 2010; Levine 2010; McCormack 2010; Metz 2010; Norget 2010; Poirier 2010; Schuster 2010; Sillitoe 2010; Simon 2010; Thom 2010; Trigger and Dalley 2010; Watson 2010; Widmer 2010). We emphasize here, however, the ethnographic engagement with indigeneity itself.…”