“The Paradise of the Latrine”: American Toilet-Building and the Continuities of Colonial and Postcolonial Development

Abstract

The Sanitary Hamlet Program, a rural health project intended to serve counterinsurgency goals in wartime Vietnam, focused on ending open-air defecation and instructing Vietnamese in the correct use of latrines. This program belongs within a larger arc of American nation-building cum toilet-building at home and abroad in the twentieth century; American toilet-building shared common features and served common functions from the age of formal empire through the postcolonial era. Looking beyond the rhetoric of modernization to on-the-ground practices reveals how American approaches to international development after 1945 continued to be shaped by racialized perceptions of foreign peoples. But the project was not simply the product of an American neo-colonial impulse. It was also an expression of South Vietnamese leaders’ postcolonial worldview—one that similarly targeted unsanitary peasants for hygienic reform.

COVID-19 & Sociocultural Determinants of Global Sanitation: An Aide-Mémoire and Call to Decolonize Global Sanitation Research & Practice

“…Contemporary colonial approaches that exclude relevant stakeholders at the formative and financing stages of sanitation intervention development and Eurocentric global public health that fails to account for sociocultural nuances of the target populations are key reasons for low uptake and failures of sanitation interventions [ 38 39 40 ]. For example, the Transition Management framework in sanitation [ 41 ] and the Sanitary Hamlet Program in Vietnam [ 42 ] are excellent case studies of the limitations of a solely Western approach to introducing sanitation interventions in LMICs. Culture, the driving force determining sociocultural norms and behaviors, is embedded in all aspects of people’s lives—sanitation is no exception.…”