Editorial: Introduction to History, Health, and Hybridity

In 2005, a History, Health, and Hybridity: New Zealand and the Pacific Research Cluster was formally constituted at the University of Otago. A key impetus behind the founding of the Cluster was the recognition that New Zealand is a Pacific nation and has close links with many Pacific communities, from an institutional to an informal nature. Through research on historical and contemporary health policies and practices, the cluster serves to highlight the Pacific dimension of New Zealand society and New Zealand links with Island communities. It brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines who are working on aspects of health-related research in New Zealand and the Pacific, including environmental impacts, housing, gender and health, sustainability, ethics and policy formation, and mental health. Otago has a strong tradition of health-related research in humanities and this Cluster serves to highlight that distinctiveness.1
      It was Charles Darwin who first used the term ‘hybridity’ in 1837 in reference to his experiments with cross fertilisation in plants. The term then had a purely biological dimension and suggested fixed origins and essences. When choosing the theme ‘History, Health, and Hybridity’ for the December 2005 symposium which gave rise to this edition of Health & History, we were seeking to employ a more expansive use of the term hybridity and to examine its salience for the history of medicine. Hybridity has proved useful in recent postcolonial scholarship because of its potential to suggest the multiple origins of both people and practices. However, it has the danger, as Marwan Kraidy warns, of meaning both everything and nothing, ‘when fragments of discourse or data are cobbled together and called hybridity in several registers—historical, rhetorical, existential, economic, and so on.’ Here we take up Kraidy’s challenge ‘to situate every analysis of hybridity in a specific context where the conditions that shape hybridities are discussed.’12
      The point of our symposium was to stimulate discussion around the ways in which concepts of health and disease, and medical practices, are composed of elements from different cultural contexts in the Pacific region. The sites of our discussion were various in their geographic location, ethnic composition, and timeframe and gave rise to debate about the way western medicine, often seen as a unified concept, was itself fractured and various in its encounters with other systems of healing. As Annie Stuart writes in her article, hybridity ‘has the potential to encompass and express the dynamism and multi-layered complexity of interactions and processes across a diverse region. It highlights juxtapositions and the way in which apparently-fixed entities actually comprise contradictory elements, and therefore contain an inherent tension and potential to re-form in unexpected ways.’3
      Only five of the original symposium papers are represented here but we are grateful to all the participants for insights which benefited this collection. Those participants included Jacqui Leckie and Heather Young-Leslie, who addressed very different aspects of health care in the Pacific. Leckie’s discussion of madness and pregnancy in Fiji suggested how the western individualised concept of health was at odds with Fijian notions of care while Young-Leslie outlined the intersection between medicine, modernity, and culture apparent in the experiences of early Tongan students at the Central Medical School. Lorelle Burke discussed the experience of Maori patients at the Auckland Lunatic Asylum who were cared for and treated—or ignored—by those who did not share their language. Health education for Maori was the subject of Barbara Brookes’ paper on a 1952 film about tuberculosis. Hans Pols discussed Indonesian physicians and the importance of this small group of trained men in the nationalist movement. A new professional class, which defined itself on the basis of education and skill, diagnosed their colonial society as sick and in need of independence as a cure. Finally, Nancy Pollock addressed the way in which Pacific foods are the result of transculturation and that the adoption of new dietary regimes may have unforeseen consequences for health.4
      This volume of Health & History begins with Anne Perez Hattori’s analysis of an American-founded maternity hospital in Guam in Micronesia: a place where the local Chamorro people faced a transition in colonial power from the Spanish to the Americans in 1898. The Susana hospital was a physical space in which native and western notions of maternal health collided. The hospital, Anne Perez Hattori argues, became a contact zone where mothers and midwives produced a hybridised version of obstetrical care.5
      Annie Stuart focuses on the Rockefeller Foundation itself—as a hybrid organization through which private wealth was distributed to public ends—and the role of its representative, Dr. Sylvester Lambert, in the South Pacific and Australia in the 1920s. Her paper suggests how the representative of modern western medicine could himself occupy an unstable hybrid position and that the experience of being in Melanesia forced him into the position of being a ‘witchdoctor with a ritual.’ The hybrid spaces that World War II created in Melanesia are the focus of Judy Bennett’s paper, which returns to hybridity’s biological connection by an examination of malaria. The war brought a new population to the islands and disrupted the old, creating new habitats for the spread of malaria. The Melanesian people themselves were viewed as invaluable workers in wartime but also as a liability because of endemic malaria. The exigencies of war overruled any longer term consideration of whether the procedures for control of malaria that worked for the Allies would, in the end, be detrimental to the Melanesians.6
      The final two papers in this issue shift the focus away from the Pacific Islands to mainland Australia and New Zealand. Rani Kerin’s paper takes us inland to the Ernabella Mission in South Australia, while Angela Wanhalla’s paper takes us indoors, into the way Maori housing and health were seen to be intimately related in New Zealand. European-style housing was seen as an index of civilisation and a solution to heath problems of the Maori but many Maori families preferred to adopt hybrid forms of housing which allowed them to maintain their traditional lifestyles. Kerin’s paper focuses on a mission station for Aboriginal people established in 1938 which, she argues, was a kind of hybrid mission. Through a desire to respect Aboriginal culture, the mission encouraged Aboriginal people to remain naked in the interests of their health.7
      Each of these articles interprets hybridity in a specific context and each finds it a fruitful concept to explore contestations over the meanings of health and disease. Through these particular studies of childbirth practices in Guam, hookworm eradication in Fiji and Australia, malaria control in wartime Melanesia, Maori housing, and Aboriginal nakedness we can see some of the contradictory elements in the drive to establish new understandings of health in a diversity of contexts encompassed by the Pacific Ocean.8
Barbara BrookesUniversity of Otago


Notes1. Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), vi.

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