285 pages

English

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Curing the Colonizers , livre ebook

Duke University Press - Jennings Eric T. Jennings

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285 pages

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"Beware! Against the poison that is Africa, there is but one antidote: Vichy." So ran a 1924 advertisement for one of France's main spas. Throughout the French empire, spas featuring water cures, often combined with "climatic" cures, thrived during the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Water cures and high-altitude resorts were widely believed to serve vital therapeutic and even prophylactic functions against tropical disease and the tropics themselves. The Ministry of the Colonies published bulletins accrediting a host of spas thought to be effective against tropical ailments ranging from malaria to yellow fever; specialized guidebooks dispensed advice on the best spas for "colonial ills." Administrators were granted regular furloughs to "take the waters" back home in France. In the colonies, spas assuaged homesickness by creating oases of France abroad. Colonizers frequented spas to maintain their strength, preserve their French identity, and cultivate their difference from the colonized.Combining the histories of empire, leisure, tourism, culture, and medicine, Eric T. Jennings sheds new light on the workings of empire by examining the rationale and practice of French colonial hydrotherapy between 1830 and 1962. He traces colonial acclimatization theory and the development of a "science" of hydrotherapy appropriate to colonial spaces, and he chronicles and compares the histories of spas in several French colonies-Guadeloupe, Madagascar, Tunisia, and Reunion-and in France itself. Throughout Curing the Colonizers, Jennings illuminates the relationship between indigenous and French colonial therapeutic knowledge as well as the ultimate failure of the spas to make colonialism physically or morally safe for the French.

Sujets

Histoire

History of medicine

Alternative medicine

France

Informations

Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	25 octobre 2006
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822388272
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1398€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CuringtheColonizers

Curingthe Colonizers , ,    

Eric T. Jennings

Duke University Press Durham and London 

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Fournier by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of Victoria College at the University of Toronto, which provided a Victoria Senate Research Grant toward the distribution of this book.

For Tina, who knows why

Contents



























Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

. Acclimatization, Climatology, and the Possibility of Empire

. Colonial Hydrotherapy

. Highland Hydrotherapy in Guadeloupe

. The Spas of Réunion Island: Antechambers to the Tropics

. Leisure and Power at the Spa of Antsirabe, Madagascar

. Korbous, Tunisia: Negating theHammam

. Vichy: Taking the Waters Back Home

Conclusion

Archival Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

The importance and pervasiveness of colonial hydrotherapy dawned on me while I was researching my previous book on the colonial politics of the Vichy regime. The town of Vichy’s longstanding colonial function, its countless im-perial connections, including its missionary house, its colonial associations, and its hospital that had catered to colonial troops since the invasion of Alge-ria all begged for explanation. Similarly, in Madagascar under Pétainist rule, I observed how colonials stranded in the colony and denied their regular fur-loughs back to France—a minor inconvenience of global war—thronged to the highland spa of Antsirabe, which they took for an ersatz home. At this ‘‘Vichy of Madagascar’’ they sought not merely leisure, but also cures for ma-laria and colonial ‘‘anemia,’’ reinvigoration, reimmersion in clement climes, and revitalization through a potent mineral water cure. How did Vichy itself and Antsirabe in Madagascar emerge as sites of colonialvillégiature? What was their role in the French colonial matrix? How did hydrotherapy come to be seen as the method of choice for treating or even avoiding colonial ills? These questions drove me to undertake this book, whose ramiﬁcations soon extended beyond Vichy and Antsirabe to encompass spas in Réunion Island, Guadeloupe, and Tunisia. Spa research and ﬁeldwork, pleasant though it may sound, requires funding. I could not have immersed myself in colonial hydrotherapy without the sup-port of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded major research trips to Aix-en-Provence, Madagascar, and Guade-loupe. Subsequent research at Vichy and in Norway’s missionary archives was