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Colonial Theatres of Proof: Representation
and Laughter in 1930s Rockefeller Foundation Hygiene Cinema in Java
Eric A. Stein
The
Rockefeller Foundation efforts in 1930s hookworm prevention
campaigns among rural populations in Dutch colonial Java relied
on film as a technique of health persuasion. Forms of visual
representation within Rockefeller Foundation hygiene films
assumed an audience that was scientifically and cinematically
illiterate. Drawing on textual readings of the films, this
paper explores the construction of causality and magnification
as forms of 'proof' within film narratives, and the use of
slapstick humour to draw in audiences. The memory fragments
of octogenarian Javanese viewers suggest that the films instigated
a state of play in which laughter both mocked the latrine
construction efforts of local health agents and also enabled
those agents to enter the private sphere of the home for further
health interventions. The implication of such pairings between
colonialism and entertainment for thinking more broadly about
power also are explored here.
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In the mid-1930s, local
'hygiene technicians' (mantri hygiëne) who were trained as
part of Rockefeller Foundation hookworm prevention campaigns brought
outdoor hygiene cinema to the crowded public squares of rice-farming
villages throughout Banyumas, Central Java. Even today, people in
Banyumas who are now in their eighties remember that the monthly
silent films were more popular than the Javanese shadow puppet (wayang
kulit) theatre and were 'looked forward to continuously.' They
referred to the films as komidhi sorot, a Javanese term which
could be translated as 'light-beam circus' or perhaps more accurately
as 'spotlight theatre.' Seventy years after the spotlight theatre
ended its run, these Banyumas villagers can still recall being startled
by the 'pictures of worms that were still alive' and seeing images
of 'stick-thin' parasite-infected bodies with 'bulging stomachs'
projected upon the cinema screen. Often the hygiene technicians
showed comedy and drama reels to accompany the health films and
entertain the throngs of villagers, nearly all of whom had never
before seen moving pictures. Before the komidhi sorot, 'there
were only tales about films playing in the city,' one woman explained,
but those were only 'for the rich … sadly, they cost five
ketip.'
1
Unlike the oil-burning lamps that cast the shadows of the traditional
wayang kulit puppet performances and reaffirmed the moral
order of the Javanese world, the diesel-powered electric light of
the film projectors was intended to usher a new colonial modernity
into the village that was premised on the illumination of the etiological
order of tropical disease. Drawing on textual readings of the hygiene
cinema and the memory fragments of octogenarian Javanese viewers,
this article explores colonial attempts to visually prove the need
for rural hygiene in 1930s Banyumas and considers how such endeavors
may have been challenged by the uncontrollable laughter of Javanese
audiences and the structural limits of the villages. |
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In
The Pasteurization of France, Bruno Latour describes Louis
Pasteur's attempts to certify the validity of germ theory in the
1880s by engaging the skeptical audiences of anticontagionists and
believers in 'morbid spontaneity' with dramatic displays of microbial
potency:
Pasteur's genius was in what might be called the theater
of the proof…. Pasteur invented such dramatized experiments
that the spectators could see the phenomena he was describing
in black and white. Nobody really knew what an epidemic was; to
acquire such knowledge required a difficult statistical knowledge
and long experience. But the differential death that struck a
crowd of chickens in the laboratory was something that could be
seen 'as in broad daylight.' … To 'force' someone to 'share'
one's point of view, one must indeed invent a new theater of truth.
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Like Pasteur's anthrax experiments on goats, chickens, and cows,
early-twentieth-century health propaganda movies in the United States
and Europe similarly attempted to construct 'theatres of proof'
that would 'force' audiences to 'share' the perception that invisible
pathogens accumulated on the feet of flies, in mosquitoes, in the
bodies of prostitutes, in the lungs of the sick, and in deposits
of excrement. Health agencies deployed film technology as an ideal
mode for visualising the invisible, narrating causal chains of contagion,
and projecting a sense of objectivity.
3
Films used microscopy to isolate and magnify images of parasites
and other pathogens in motion, swimming in the bloodstream, and
feeding on bodily organs.
4
As Kirsten Ostherr suggests in Cinematic Prophylaxis, such
scenes fostered the 'representational inoculation' of audiences,
training viewers to identify and categorise threatening situations
and the social types that carried disease.
5
Beyond its function as 'theatre of proof,' the hygiene cinema held
the potential to become a 'cultural technology for the discipline
and management of the human body.'
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While health propagandists envisioned
presentations of germs and germ carriers in the theatre as potent
forms of visual proof, cinematic constructions of microbial dangers
and social deviance also met with popular misunderstandings, contestations,
and various forms of censorship. In the United States and Britain,
certain early-twentieth-century health propaganda films, such as
those centred on the sexual deviance of the syphilitic body, stirred
the disgust and moral anxieties of viewing publics, film critics,
and religious coalitions, leading to the establishment of institutional
production codes for the monitoring and censorship of 'improper'
content.
7
Such protests and restrictions instigated the general decline of
documentary film genres in popular movie houses by the 1930s. As
Martin Pernick explains, 'producers, exhibitors, and critics began
to demand movies that provided entertainment, not intellectually
demanding, emotionally upsetting, or aesthetically unpleasant medical
topics.'
8
Though health propaganda films continued to be shown in schools
and military barracks, studies of their effectiveness sometimes
found that they failed to inspire long-term modification of viewers'
sexual practices or hygienic behaviours.
9
The spectacular nature of film technology perhaps entailed a reduction
of the message to the medium: the hygiene film produced a mass spectacle
that divorced viewers from their everyday experience and failed
to connect psychologically with behavioral imperatives.
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If anxieties and limits arose from
American and European hygiene cinema unmediated by translation,
colonial 'theatres of proof' presented to Asian or African populations
were understood to entail additional challenges to the process of
truth production. Pasteur expected the audiences of his experiments
to already share fundamental ideas about causality, experimental
processes, evidence, and certainty; furthermore, they came from
similar class and cultural backgrounds and perhaps granted Pasteur
credibility as a scientific 'gentleman.'
11
In contrast, colonial film makers had to face their own orientalist
conceptions of their viewers' irrationalities and fundamental differences,
which they believed could make the messages of the health films
illegible and impossible to 'share.' Colonial theatres of proof,
therefore, constituted an ethnographic zone of reverse cultural
translation. Unlike ethnography, which translates 'foreign' culture
into the ethnographer's 'own' language, creating theatres of proof
in the colonies evoked the discomfort one faces when attempting
to translate from one's native language into that of the 'other.'
Filmmakers, concerned that audiences would be unable to comprehend
the basic principles of causation and certainty, sometimes included
those lessons alongside specific discussions of worms and germs.
They also attempted to circumvent such difficulties entirely through
the use of narrative techniques that appeared to be universally
transparent.
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In colonial Africa, public health
film makers fretted over the perceived burden of designing materials
that could effectively reach illiterate 'others,' whom they feared
would be overly mesmerised and perplexed by the biomedically-based
evidentiary technologies used in the films of the metropole. As
Megan Vaughan describes in Curing Their Ills, colonial administrators
in 1940s Africa studied audience reactions to hygiene films and
hypothesised that 'inappropriate' laughter arose because of the
strangeness of the film narratives.
12
George Pearson, a director in the British Colonial Film Unit, delighted
in sharing stories of African misperceptions that mosquitoes magnified
enormously on film screens were showing real monstrous insects in
actual scale.
13
Thus, although health propagandists were troubled by supposed African
cinematic illiteracy, such evidence of difference was also used
to reconfirm their own logical civility and authorise the necessity
of colonial education efforts to bridge such epistemological divides.
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The Rockefeller Foundation projects
in Java, attuned to this supposed crisis of cross-cultural cinematic
representation, both studied Javanese audience reactions to 'abstract'
visual processes like magnification and produced 'transparent' film
narratives that appeared continuous with Javanese experiential reality.
The first section of this paper examines several films—on
hookworm control, latrine construction, plague prevention, as well
as technology and comedy clips—that were recovered from a
trash pile behind a former regional medical administration building
in Purwokerto, Central Java, in 2002.
14
These films, likely to be the same ones shown in Banyumas villages
in the 1930s, exhibit a range of narrative styles, visual techniques,
and intended audience positions. Some are like those shown in metropolitan
theatre houses, designed to shock and disgust with vivid images
of immense parasites squirming on the screen. Others adopt a didactic
format that points directly at the viewer, constructing the position
of student in a classroom setting. While the films reveal a concern
with cinematic illiteracy and establishing 'proof,' they also demonstrate
an appreciation for the dynamics of Javanese audiences through the
inclusion of comic elements that parallel the wayang theatre
and set a place for the hygiene technicians to enter homes and backyards,
and inspect latrines. |
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The second section situates
the memories of the films within the wider history of the hygiene
projects in late colonial Banyumas. Shown in the mid-1930s during
the height of economic depression, famine, and forced labour transmigration
to Sumatra, the mass entertainment of the hygiene films provided
an unusual contrast with the forms of material and symbolic violence
that inhabited the latecolonial world. I suggest that the hygiene
projects instigated a particular state of play, in which villagers
renamed the hygiene technicians 'outhouse technicians' and read
the thin-bodied, bulging-stomachs of hookworm victims projected
on the screen as Gareng, a comic figure within the wayang
pantheon that evoked public laughter. While the collective agency
of laughter may have redefined hookworm-infected bodies as shameful,
structural limits of poverty prevented many Banyumas villagers from
following the hygiene films' prescriptions to construct latrines,
even into the present.
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Difference,
representation, and proof |
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The Rockefeller Foundation International Health Division projects
in Java were part of much broader hookworm eradication campaigns
that extended to over sixty countries and colonial territories in
Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United
States 'South' from 1913 to the 1930s.
15
The campaigns in Java, which spanned a fifteen-year period from
1924 until 1939, carried on far longer and later than any of the
other hookworm campaigns and evolved into an intensive rural population
engineering scheme that was intended to reach all aspects of Javanese
hygienic and sanitary life. By the late-1930s, John L. Hydrick,
the Rockefeller Foundation field officer for the Netherlands East
Indies, had generated a particularly utopian vision of rural hygiene
in which Javanese peasants were to actively embrace handwashing,
toothbrushing, boiling water, sweeping yards, and whitewashing homes,
while at the same time wilfully assembling the 'costless' rudimentary
bamboo infrastructure of water spigots and latrines that prevented
communicable disease.
16
Hydrick used the language of 'awakening' to describe the process
through which Javanese subjects, after educational home visits by
hygiene 'mantri' (technicians) and public film events, were
to rationally identify and respond to the pathogenicity of worms
and germs. The fundamental assumption of Hydrick's projects was
that with adequate persuasion villagers would come to desire instruments
of hygiene as vital commodities to the same extent that they desired
other basic needs they could already afford: rice, fuel, transportation,
and shelter. The strategy presaged the core principles of more recent
sustainable development and community participation paradigms, while
at the same time placing responsibility for health not on colonial
authorities, but on villagers themselves.
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As an outsider to the Netherlands
East Indies encroaching on its medical sovereignty, Hydrick faced
prolonged tensions with the Dutch Public Health Services (Dienst
der Volksgezondheid; DVG).
17
In 1923, Dr. Van Lonkhuijzen, head of the DVG, pre-empted Hydrick's
arrival on Java with an anti-American and anti-Rockefeller speech
in the Netherlands Indies People's Council (Volksraad).
18
Although the DVG had already instituted a division of Medical-Hygiene
Propaganda in 1920, several years before Hydrick arrived, Dutch
medicine in the colony was largely clinical, focused on hospital
care rather than rural prevention.
19
Within this clinical climate, Hydrick struggled to establish the
credibility of his work for much of his stay in the Indies, but
received limited acceptance by the end of 1926, when the Netherlands
Indies governor general gave Hydrick the title of Advisor for Medical
Propaganda after proving the effectiveness of his latrine promotion
techniques.
20
Having secured at least a tenuous partnership with the DVG, by the
late 1920s Hydrick developed a studio and manufacturing plant in
which he produced numerous silent films, slides, photographs, charts,
posters, and placards as part of his role as advisor to the Medical-Hygiene
Propaganda Division of the Netherlands East Indies colony.
21
He distributed these materials on 'huge motor lorries' that travelled
through villages, dispersing the fundamental tools used by the hygiene
technicians to educate rural publics.
22
After 1933, the cornerstone of Hydrick's projects in Java was the
Poerwokerto Demonstration Unit in Banyumas, a bounded area with
sixty 'model' villages and a school for training hygiene mantri,
in which Hydrick could put his various educational experiments to
the test. The Demonstration Unit served as its own 'theatre of proof'
in which the many visiting diplomats and health officials from neighbouring
colonies who travelled through Java could witness the civilising
philanthropy of the Dutch East Indies and the ingenuity of the Rockefeller
Foundation. By the end of the 1930s, the head of the DVG called
Hydrick's Demonstration Unit in Poerwokerto the 'centre of rural
hygiene' for all of the colony.
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Although Hydrick departed from the
Netherlands East Indies in 1939, his projects were carried on by
the many Indonesian physicians he had trained during his fifteen
years in the colony. When Dutch soldiers arrived in Banyumas in
1947 as part of an effort to retake the colony after the Japanese
occupation during World War II, Indonesian nationalist doctors fighting
in the War of Independence fled to Magelang further to the East
and reestablished Hydrick's school for training hygiene mantri,
claiming the project of rural hygiene for the coming Indonesian
nation. While curative care was expanded through the creation of
new medical facilities under the new Republic of Indonesia, the
key features of the Rockefeller Foundation rural hygiene model were
retained and further developed by Dr. Raden Mochtar, a key figure
in the Rockefeller Foundation projects in the late 1930s who served
as the head of the Division of General Hygiene for the Indonesian
Department of Health through much of the 1950s.
24
Some of the hygiene films may have been shown in new rural hygiene
demonstration areas outside of Banyumas at that time, as part of
the nationalist imaginary of a strong and hygienic Indonesian citizenry.
25
Thus, the project of rural hygiene education as well as translation
continued into the Sukarno period, with urban elite doctors viewing
Javanese publics as scientifically challenged and in need of supplemental
lessons on magnification and causality.
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Hydrick's
hygiene propaganda materials anticipated and invented the
problem of Javanese scientific and cinematic 'illiteracy' by breaking
down disease processes into multiple parts. He understood hookworm
in particular as a complex problem having chains of communicative
causality, visible effects on the body, internal experiences of
sufferers, stages of curing, and extensive processes of prevention.
Hydrick treated each of these dimensions as susceptible to Javanese
misrecognition, creating specific evidentiary techniques and narratives
that would illuminate the validity of Rockefeller Foundation etiologies
and cures. The problem of causality—of worms entering the
body and causing sickness, of purgatives entering the body and causing
wellness, and of latrines entering the village and preventing worms—was
addressed through a number of 'before and after' narratives that
relied on temporal sequence to establish validity. Like the hygiene
cinema in Europe and the US, the invisibility of pathogens was perceived
to be an additional problem that required proof through magnification.
Yet, in Java Hydrick also presumed that the process of magnification
was beyond basic Javanese comprehension; therefore, he devised a
series of materials to show the ways that lenses could enlarge visible
objects already known within the Javanese experiential world. These
dual frames of causality and magnification were applied to the various
dimensions of the disease processes depicted within the hygiene
films, creating narratives intended to compel Javanese audiences
to 'share' the truth and adopt hygienic lifestyles.
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Both of these elements are prominent
within the Rockefeller Foundation hygiene film, Unhooking the
Hookworm, a Dutch-Malay version of which was present in the
former medical administration offices in Java. The Rockefeller Foundation
International Health Board released the ten-minute silent film in
1920 to be shown at fairs and public events to Southern rural communities
in the United States, before it was translated and shipped out to
the various hookworm campaigns abroad.
26
Like other hygiene films of the times that astonished audiences
with visual tricks, Unhooking the Hookworm used cinema microscopy
to show worms hatching from eggs within the bloodstream, as well
as slide stains of the depleted red blood cells of severely anaemic
hookworm sufferers. Stop-action 'claymation'-like sequences mimicked
the microscopic by depicting worms invading the body through pores,
feeding on the inside of the intestines, and draining the body's
blood. The primary narrative of the film follows the kind of causal
before-and-after theme that was standard to many health propaganda
movies. At the start, a white Southern child of approximately ten
years of age turns down his friend's request to go swimming because
he is 'too tired.' The camera view enters the boy's body and shows
the worms hatching from microscopic eggs and writhing inside before
turning back in time to the various sources of soil pollution that
led to the infection. The film then traces the path of hookworm
larvae through the body on an animated anatomical chart supplemented
with microscopic views, showing how it enters through the feet,
travels in the blood to the heart, and makes its way to the lungs,
where it is expectorated, swallowed, and enters the digestive system
where it latches onto the intestines with a 'poison fang' that draws
the blood. The boy's father takes him to a doctor, who slips away
into his laboratory to perform additional microscopy on the boy's
fecal sample and prescribes, from an unusually well-stocked pharmaceutical
collection, an oil of chenopodium tablet to kill the worms and Epsom
salts to purge the remains. After taking the drugs and purging the
worms, which make a brief appearance nestled in a small heap, the
boy regains his vital energy and runs off to the local pond to swim
with his friends. The film ends with the prescriptive advice to
improve poor latrines to avoid repeat infection. The before and
after narrative establishes a clear chain of causality that details
the origin of infection, the internal etiology of the worm larvae,
the bodily state of the sufferer, the mode of diagnosis, the method
of cure, and the end result, all of which is copiously supplemented
with microscopic views into the body and soil. |
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In
contrast with the complex, nonchronological causality and technological
perception used in Unhooking the Hookworm, hygiene films
produced in Java exhibit a causal simplicity that follow uninterrupted,
unidirectional sequential chains and make very careful use of technologies
of magnification. One of the films from the Java collection replicates
the 'before and after' theme of Unhooking the Hookworm, narrating
the story of Kromo, a Javanese rice farmer who learns the truth
of his debilitating hookworm infection from a visiting hygiene technician,
takes the cure, and regains his productive capacities.
27
The use of the term Kromo, a somewhat antiquated colonial-Malay
word for the 'common people,' is meant to refer not only to the
man in the story, but the whole of the Javanese peasantry. As Vaughan
suggests, such film narrative techniques were used in African hygiene
campaigns to create 'audience positions' that attempted to establish
a unified subjectivity for the viewing crowd.
28
Similarly, Javanese audience members, expected to self-identify
as Kromo, were to look to the everyman depicted in the film
and feel his suffering, admitting their shared illness experience.
For Hydrick, the use of the name 'Kromo,' the everyman, to depict
the lead character in his film on hookworm reflects his wider epidemiological
belief in the Javanese as inherently diseased, as he claimed that
'the statement that every Javanese is a hookworm carrier seems to
be true in a general way, judging from the results of our investigation.'
29
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The film begins with Kromo working
in the rice fields alongside his friend, Simin.
30
Showing his anemic exhaustion by wearily turning the soil while
Simin works heartily beside him, Kromo excuses himself from the
fields and walks back on the dirt road toward his home in the village.
He soon slows to a halt and sits on the ground at the side of the
road, removing his shirt and placing his head in his hands, too
weak to continue (see Image 1).
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Image
1: Kromo at the side of the road. (Image taken from
DVG Medical Hygiene Propaganda film slide, ca. 1930s.
Courtesy of General Sudirman University Library.)
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The film text, appearing in a split frame with Malay on the left
and Dutch on the right, narrates the subject's inner experience:
'For a long time Kromo has felt this way, that his body is easily
exhausted, lacking strength and uncomfortable. It is probably the
sickness.' After returning to his home, Kromo suffers in bed and
sits wearily in his yard, later visited by his friend, Simin who
sends along the hygiene mantri. In the next scene, the mantri,
wearing a pith helmet, a formal western style jacket, and a Javanese
sarong, squats in front of the home next to Kromo and Kromo's wife
and daughter, unfolding various health posters that explain the
sickness (see Image 2). One of the posters shown to the viewer presents
a simplified causal narrative, depicting a thin, sickly boy on the
left with the caption 'before treatment' and the same boy on the
right, now fat and healthy with the caption 'after treatment' (see
Image 3). Without delving into the etiology of the disease, the
film uses the indisputable evidence of the before and after narrative
to reference Kromo's own pathology and suggest treatment. At the
end of this session, the text reads 'Kromo understands how great
the benefit is of having a latrine. He intends to make one.' Later,
Simin shows Kromo his own well-constructed, whitewashed latrine
and helps him dig a latrine in his own yard. After it is completed,
Kromo and his family seek treatment for worms, lining up with other
villagers to drink the purgative medicines set out by the mantri
on a table in the public square.
31
Several days after taking the medicine, Kromo feels better and heads
out to the rice field. His body is full of energy, he swings his
arms and leaps effortlessly over fallen palm fronds on his way to
returning to work with Simin, where he easily lifts a heavy load
of padi (rice) on his back and shares a cigarette with his
friend on the way to the rice mill in the final scene.
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The Kromo tale exhibits the standard
devices of the before-and-after narrative. Simin serves as the masculine,
robust, and knowing foil who contrasts with Kromo's productive weakness,
gendering his pathology. Unlike the VD films of the 1920s United
States that depended on similar contrasts, the Kromo film avoids
an explicitly moralising tone and instead presents hookworm as a
public unknown that could be understood through the teachings of
the hygiene mantri. The emphasis on Kromo's internal emotional
states as he suffers from debilitating weakness intends to draw
the empathy and identification of the audience, who Kromo nominally
represents. The process of fighting hookworm is depicted as an opportunity
for enhanced comradeship between Simin and Kromo, who work closely
together to construct the latrine and harvest padi, evoking the
Javanese/Malay principle of 'mutual aid' (gotong-royong). The narrative
is thus tailored specifically to imagined Javanese audiences: it
is devoid of complex etiological descriptions, cinematic illusions,
or signs of Dutch presence aside from the Dutch caption text that
appears beside the Malay and was illegible to largely illiterate
viewers.
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Image 2: Hygiene mantri in home visit with Kromo.
(Image taken from DVG Medical Hygiene Propaganda
film slide, ca. 1930s. Courtesy of General Sudirman
University Library.)
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Image 3: Before and After Treatment. (Image taken
from DVG Medical Hygiene Propaganda film slide,
ca. 1930s. Courtesy of General Sudirman University
Library.
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Other
'before-and-after' films adapted a clearly moralising tone. A film
on plague prevention from the collection appears to be an earlier
Dutch production from campaigns in the 1920s, produced during a
virulent plague epidemic in Central Java.
33
It begins with a Javanese village head kneeling before a white-clad
Dutch official to report a plague death. The official passes this
information on to a Javanese 'intelligence technician' (mantri-inlichter),
who rides off on his horse to inspect the village in question. The
caption introduces the location of the plague death as a 'village
that has not yet been upgraded,' showing the disheveled bamboo home
of the mourning inhabitants. After drawing their blood for a plague
test, the mantri overturns the order of the house, digging
out rats in wall cavities, from under beds, in unused kitchen stoves,
in woodpiles, and from inside the bamboo roof beams his assistants
tear out and split in half lengthwise. The mantri established
the significance of each rat as a marker of sanitary and moral failure
by swinging each one by the tail in the direction of the widow,
pointing out her guilty complicity in the rat-friendly conditions
of the home that led to her husband's death by plague. In one instance,
the Dutch official, who arrives later in the story, dangles a dead
rat pulled from a hollow beam inches from the face of a watching
villager. Such indisputable proof of the inadequacy of village architecture,
which had become a breeding ground for plague-ridden vermin, justified
the levelling of existing homes and the project of total reconstruction,
as is depicted in the second half of the film. |
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Films
produced by Hydrick as part of his rural hygiene campaigns also
aspired to shock audiences with the visual presentation of disease.
Victor Heiser, the Rockefeller Foundation IHD director for the Far
East, visited Hydrick's film studios in the early 1930s and described
the films and other propaganda materials as having content that
was 'very disgusting.'
34
In one badly damaged film from which only several film strips were
salvageable, a distinct method of portraiture evokes disgust: Javanese
subjects are shown holding pans containing the heaps of worms that
had been expelled from their bodies following vermifuge treatments
(see Image 4). The technique was not specific to Hydrick's work,
but is a photographic theme present in Rockefeller Foundation projects
in other countries; often, captions beneath such photos stated the
precise number of worms lying in the heap.
35
These dramatic scenes suggest an epidemiological confessional, in
which the subject, isolated and individuated by the genre of portraiture,
reveals inner infection. The image of the expelled worms, killed
by the vermifuge medication, signifies the truth of the diseased
Javanese body and aimed to turn audience disgust inward, toward
the wormy self. As Laura Citrin has argued, disgust serves as a
powerful moralising emotion.
36
Hydrick used images of worms, flies, yaws-infected bodies, plague
rats, and other filth to distinguish between morally valid and invalid
action by producing visceral reactions within audiences. Such scenes
of writhing worms were among the few salient images that older Banyumas
villagers recalled almost seventy years after watching them, perhaps
because they were so deeply tied to moralising sentiment.
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Image
4: Boy holding pan with expelled worms. (Image taken
from DVG Medical Hygiene Propaganda film slide, ca.
1930s. Courtesy of General Sudirman University Library.)
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While the enlarged adult worms on
the screen demonstrated the efficacy of the purgative treatments
and revealed inner pathology, Hydrick was particularly concerned
with showing the hookworm larvae—the invisible pathogens in
the polluted soil that originated from unhygienic defecation practices.
37
But Hydrick was clearly troubled by the process of magnification,
which he believed to be too complex and abstract for Javanese peasants
to comprehend. Before microscopes could be used to show invisible
pathogens, as in the United States film Unhooking the Hookworm,
Hydrick prepared audiences with careful explanations of the process
of visual enlargement. In several recovered film clips and other
propaganda posters, magnification is broken into a multistage process
recapitulating an imagined evolution of the technology itself. First
the known is presented: coins and earthworms are placed together
and then inside the enlarging lens of an ordinary glass of water,
demonstrating that magnification can be carried out even with existing
tools in the village (see Image 5). From there a magnifying glass—like
the one that some of the hygiene mantri carried on their
village rounds—shows smaller objects, such as ants, expanded
in size. Finally a microscope shows a single ant appear larger under
each power of lens until magnification has reached the scale where
the hookworm larvae could be shown. In what is one of the more powerful
images within Hydrick's propaganda work, rural peasants line up
to look through a microscope set up by a watching hygiene mantri,
bringing the laboratory into village life. Hydrick not only made
such careful presentations of magnification, but studied the results
as well. Dr Soemedi, the regional director of the Poerwokerto Demonstration
Unit, tested viewer comprehension of magnification in West Java,
finding that 76 percent of uneducated villagers and 100 percent
of educated villagers understood the process after watching the
films.
38
The success of the simplified approach was thus verified for Hydrick,
who relied on proof of the invisible to displace spirits, winds,
and other notions of pathogenicity that inhabited the Javanese world
view. |
21 |
|
Though Hydrick's theatre of proof
assumed 'native' irrationality and technological infancy, memory
fragments of the past suggest another reading of Javanese encounters
with mantris and propaganda. When I asked an older Javanese
man about the mantris' use of magnifying glasses to teach
people about hookworms, he denied the possibility that magnification
was any barrier to villager's understandings of the cause of their
illness, explaining that 'of course we knew what was making us sick,
every time we defecated we could see the worms coming out.' Though
such memories are inflected with present Javanese biomedical understandings,
the logic of the man's statement—that worms were visible
and needed no explanation—challenges Hydrick's perception
of Javanese villagers as too rationally immature to draw such causal
inferences. Yet, as much as it served as an instrument of visualisation
intended to bridge epistemological gaps, Hydrick's obsession with
the microscope was also bound to the colonial use of technology
as a 'measure of man' that placed Javanese subjects within hierarchies
of rule by revealing their scientific inferiority.
39 |
22
|
|
| |
|
Image
5: Worms and Coins. (Image taken from DVG Medical
Hygiene Propaganda film slide, ca. 1930s. Courtesy
of General Sudirman University Library.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
These hierarchies of rule were further
extended through the project of rural hygiene itself by transferring
not the 'modern' technologies of gleaming porcelain, septic tanks,
and iron faucets, but the makeshift sanitary technologies
that could be cobbled together from the 'free' stones, bamboo, palm
leaves, and clay that surrounded the rural environs. While Andrew
Balfour, a leader in the field of tropical medicine, advocated the
use of 'sanitary makeshifts' during the 'exceptional circumstances'
of wartime, in Java Hydrick envisioned such improvised technological
'exceptions' to be the permanent solution to the problems of disease.
40
A three-part film from the collection extensively details the various
techniques for constructing latrines using rudimentary techniques
and low-cost materials. Javanese workers are shown digging latrine
pits with hoes, shovels, and manual ground bores; lining the pits
with woven bamboo tubes covered with tar pitch or clay segments
spun on a potters wheel; fashioning latrine bases from stones or
casting them from sand and cement; and constructing the outer walls
and roof out of bamboo and grass. The film is eminently practical,
serving as a technical manual for the construction of such sanitary
makeshifts without any explicit narrative or character development
beyond the processes of latrine craftsmanship. In several parts,
the actors in the films communicate directly with the audience,
looking toward the camera and pointing out features of the sanitary
works. In this respect the film serves as a live, teaching agent
and the audience members, through the eyes of the film camera, the
individuated 'I' of the learning subject receiving a schoolroom
lesson. At times this lesson is painfully simplified: in one scene
two men show a cast cement latrine base with its wooden mould, pointing
to their own feet and then to the raised footholds on the latrine
base, showing viewers how to defecate while squatting—a rudimentary
act already well known in Javanese life. While such technologies
might have formed the basis for a late-colonial 'sustainable development'
that empowered Javanese villagers to become active agents in the
construction of their own sanitary works, the idea that rural Java
should obtain health while remaining in the 'bamboo age' intended
to sustain the countryside in its peripheral position within the
colony and world economy alike.
41 |
22 |
|
High technology remained a lofty
ideal that floated above the rural space of the Indies colony, briefly
touching ground as a means of civilisational contrast. Among the
films present in the former medical administration office was a
reel depicting the flight and landing of the Uiver, the famous
KLM Douglas DC 2 airplane that was much revered by the Dutch for
capturing second place in the 1934 race from London to Melbourne.
In the film, the Uiver lands in Bandoeng, then called the
'Paris of the East,' and is greeted by an enormous crowd of Dutch
and Indonesian spectators. After a festive motor parade through
the city the flight crew returns to the plane and takes off for
the next destination. In his book Engineers of Happy Land on
the technologies of late-colonial Indies life, Rudolf Mrázek
explains that 'like air conditioning, for instance, the airplane
was the most wonderful technology of time and place, technology
useful by being and making up the trivial.'
42
This triviality and lightness depicted in film called forth a curious
audience of villagers to witness the wonderment of the colonial
world. Though Indonesian nationalists complained that 'air transport
had no significance for the indigenous population' as they were
largely excluded as passengers,
43
its use as a signifier of the modern—sleek, sterile, modern,
and soaring far above the filth on the ground—made it useful
as a potent parallel to the kinds of hygiene encouraged by the mantri. |
23 |
|
Dr Soemedi, the regional director
of Hydrick's Purwokerto Demonstration Unit, wrote that the 'theatres
in the villages always served as an attraction,' drawing in mass
audiences, young and old.
44
The task of generating an audience was carried out through the inclusion
of technological spectacles like the Uiver as well as other
mass entertainment features. Another film in the collection, Salim
and Sarinah, was well remembered by older Banyumas villagers.
One man recalled the specific chase scene at the start of the film
in which colonial police leap from behind bushes to break up a village
gambling ring, sending startled gamesters diving into ponds and
rolling down embankments until they are finally wrestled to the
ground and apprehended. Such scenes of tripping, diving into water,
and falling over embankments imparted a slapstick element that elicited
the laughter of contemporary viewers during a 2002 showing of the
films at General Sudirman University in Central Java and most likely
produced a similar response in the 1930s. Slapstick elements were
woven into stories of hookworm illness and recovery, creating unusual
hybrids of medicine and comedy. In the 'Kromo and Simin' tale described
earlier, Kromo's hookworm infection is exaggerated through various
comic pratfalls as he struggles wearily to carry out his work. As
Kromo digs the hole for his latrine, his hoe lodges in the soil
and he loses his grip, sending him plunging onto his backside into
the dirt. After Simin takes over and finishes digging the deep pit
Kromo reaches in feebly to pull him out, causing both men to trip
over the dirt heap and topple onto their backs. When the latrine
cover is completed and ready for use, Kromo demonstratively squats
over the hole while fully clothed, teaching the viewer the proper
position for defecation in a clearly gratuitous manner. |
24 |
|
Hyrdick, possibly following
the advice of the Javanese staff who worked beside him on the film
projects, appears to have recognised the value of generating a festive
atmosphere that would maximise attendance at the film showings.
In calling forth public laughter around the subject of hookworm,
Hydrick was, perhaps intentionally, fostering a warmer private reception
for the hygiene technicians as they visited individual villagers'
homes, talked with families, inspected yards, and checked latrines.
The following section draws on archives and memory to explore the
social, political, and economic context in which rural hygiene entered
Banyumas in the 1930s. It considers how the films, in provoking
laughter, also opened the door for the mockery of the mantri
and alternative readings of hookworm bodies. |
25 |
| |
|
Of
wayangs and worms |
|
|
The conditions of life in rural Banyumas during the 1930s were particularly
unwelcoming for persuasive rural hygiene projects that intended
to 'awaken' the interest of the Javanese in building their own sanitary
infrastructure. L.M. Gandasubrata, the bupati (regional governor)
of Banyumas from 19331950, writes in his published memoirs of the
severe depression that affected rural populations throughout the
area in the early part of the 1930s, right as Hydrick began his
model projects.
45
By 1933, all five of the sugar factories in Banyumas had closed,
suddenly evaporating the millions of guilders paid out to area peasants
for land rents.
46
Although the government insisted that 'under the Netherlands flag
no hunger exists,' Gandasubrata remembered that time as one of severe
poverty and malnutrition. In response to these conditions, the Dutch
Resident of Banyumas planned an intensive program of transmigration
out of Java to the low population density areas of Sumatra and Sulawesi,
where villagers were promised extensive landholdings—up to
two acres—and a new life in the cleared jungle settlements.
47
Almost a quarter of a million people are reported to have migrated
out of the wider Banyumas residency between 1932 and 1941, nearly
a tenth of the total population. |
26 |
|
Today, villagers in Banyumas
recall the flow of people to Sumatra in the 1930s not as voluntary
transmigrations, but as forced labour migrations to work Dutch plantations.
One man now living in an isolated hillside settlement who claimed
to be in his nineties told the story of how he was conscripted into
labour during the colonial period by a culik who sent him
to Sumatra.
48
There he was forced to work in the palm oil and rubber plantations
until after the Japanese occupation, when he married a Batak woman
and returned to Java. In Javanese, the term culik means 'a
bogeyman who pries people's eyes out.'
49
But the man had used the term culik to refer to its other,
perhaps related, Indonesian usage, meaning 'to kidnap' or 'abduct.'
Some villagers called the forced labour abductions 'werk,'
possibly remembering the term used by Dutch-speaking plantation
owners or local Javanese agents who procured labour. One man suggested
that a mantri culik existed who would come, along with village
police, to bring people away to Sumatra. There, he said, the work
was very difficult and people would come away with a kind of yaws
infection on their upper backs. Others remembered on separate occasions
the specific names of three wealthy members of the Banyumas elite
who would drive through the villages in a 'bulging, puffed up' (njembluk
in Banyumas Ngoko—the local dialect) brand of car, looking
for stray people to sell off in Poerwokerto. From there, those who
were abducted would later be sent on to Deli, the capital of the
Sumatra plantation zone. Many recalled that when such a car, or
a jeep, would drive through the village, someone from the village
would yell 'Werk! Werk!' and they would hide far from the road.
Such rumours and memories index a particularly unsettled late-colonial
structure of feeling, in which the bodies of rural peasants were
simply up for grabs within a wider extraction economy. |
27 |
If colonial violence was specifically
tied to forced labour migrations to Sumatra during the depression
of the 1930s, it was more subtly recalled as internal to the everyday
processes of order and authority. As a village shadow puppeteer
(dhalang), today in his late eighties, explained,
Dutch rules were disciplined and dictatorial….
People going to village meetings wore a batik head cloth. If someone
didn't wear it he would be struck by the village head for not
properly respecting the meeting. At that time I had to lower myself
before the assistant village head, in the old style.
50
|
28 |
|
Furthermore, strict rules were placed on the use of the drainage
canals that irrigated the rice fields, resulting in steep fines
for violations like bathing and defecation. Local officials could
also be fired for infractions of rules, such as failing to report
a death in the village to the proper authorities. People recalled
being afraid of the mantri cacar, who came through villages
periodically to give smallpox vaccinations. The hygiene mantri,
whose position as colonial 'middle figure'
51
was conceptually tied to the authority of the smallpox vaccinators
and the 'kidnapping' mantri, was sometimes feared as well.
As a former hygiene mantri recollected, often no one would
answer the door when she arrived for a house visit, but when she
stooped down she could sometimes see people's feet through the space
beneath the door, as residents kept still to avoid detection. Although
Hydrick selected the hygiene mantri from among the known
local elite who had deep genealogical ties with village society,
their connection to the authority of the colonial state placed them
in a threatening position even though their work was primarily educational. |
29 |
|
Other recollections surrounding
the mantri were quite different from those describing conscripted
labour and colonial authority. Some villagers' stories suggest that
at the same time the rural hygiene cinema served as a biomedical
'theatre of proof,' it also cultivated a warm sociality in the 1930s,
of which the mantri are a large part, which remains a locus
of present nostalgia. Hydrick suspected that mass propaganda efforts
like films and public lectures could only 'awaken a temporary interest'
in hygiene and therefore favoured the routine visits of the hygiene
mantri to individual homes as the principle means of public
health education.
52
The films paved the way for such visits in the chilling climate
of 1930s rural Banyumas by introducing the mantri to entire
village publics at once and placing them at the centre of the mass
entertainment spectacles. At the films, the mantri gave health
speeches and translated the film captions into Banyumas Javanese,
playing the role of narrator for audiences who could read neither
Dutch nor Malay. This softening of audiences had an endearing effect,
as several of the mantri continue to be remembered in very
positive terms by older Banyumas villagers. |
30 |
|
The monthly or bimonthly arrival
of the komidhi sorot generated widespread anticipation among
village publics. People in Banyumas recall that five days before
the films were to be shown an announcement was given by the village
officials and 'news began circulating all around' that the event
was coming. On the day of the showing, someone would run through
the village calling out through a loudspeaker 'Filem! Filem!…
Filem! Filem!' generating excitement for the coming event. The films
showed at eight in the evening, but 'before seven pm there were
huge crowds … people weren't playing around.' The atmosphere
was festive, with vendors selling peanuts and other snacks, and
children gathered together in large groups to watch the films where
they played in public squares, at village halls, or in the mantri's
own front yard. Many remembered the film showings to be filled with
laughter, as audience members conjoined in pleasurable entertainment
brought by the new film technologies of the 'spotlight theatre.' |
31 |
|
Though it was 'more popular'
than the shadow puppet (wayang kulit) theatre, the hygiene
cinema mirrored its form in several ways. The serious, moralising
depictions of contagion and convalescence correspond with the formal,
high Javanese moral narratives of the Mahabharata tales, which occupied
the majority of both theatrical events. By inviting laughter to
lighten the project of rural hygiene through the inclusion of slapstick
elements, the outdoor cinema also acted like the comic gara-gara
interlude of the wayang kulit theatre. The gara-gara,
which takes place late into the night, entertains with the ribald,
slapstick humour of farting, punching, and wrestling puppets. Thus,
both the wayang kulit and the spotlight theatre lingered
on the lower bodily stratum. Yet, unlike the wayang kulit
performances, in which elite male, invited guests sit watching the
shadows on one side of the screen while the uninvited masses watched
the 'live' puppets and puppeteer from the other,
53
the hygiene cinema demanded that the entire audience sit together
on one side of the screen, producing a levelling effect. |
32 |
|
By fostering a 'circus' aspect
of the komidhi sorot that mirrored the gara-gara,
Hydrick unleashed raucous pleasures of public sociality that were
rooted in the carnivalesque. While the cinematic carnival may have
softened audiences to the coming of the mantri, it also introduced
a state of play that left the mantri, as well as the films,
open to mockery. It was perhaps in this carnivalesque frame that
the hygiene mantri came to be publicly renamed as the 'mantri
kakus,' a term that translates as 'outhouse technician.' Older
Javanese use the term 'mantri kakus' with an inflection of
humour to describe the work of the hygiene technicians, whose Dutch
title, 'mantri hygiene,' they no longer recall. In Dutch,
the word 'kakus' has a still more foul translation, referring
to shit rather than its receptacle. The mockery of the 'outhouse
technicians' thus subverted the hierarchies of indirect rule, placing
the elite, educated mantri of the High Javanese world conceptually
among the peasants' filth they sought to hygienically contain. |
33 |
Though the content of the films
evoked public laughter, what people were laughing at, however,
is not entirely clear. In his study of Javanese language and internal
life, James Siegel suggests that the 'figures of the wayang permeate
Javanese thinking to the point where the puppet theatre is the richest
source of metaphor and imagery in Java.'
54
Banyumas villagers described the thin bodies, swollen stomachs,
and bulging eyes of hookworm victims as looking like Gareng,
a popular figure of the wayang pantheon (See Image 6). Gareng is
one of the punakawan, the comic, misshapen sons of Semar
who emerge in shadow puppet performances especially during the gara-gara
interlude late in the night to entertain with slapstick humour.
Ward Keeler suggests that the punakawan are as 'well-loved
and intimately known as brothers to Javanese,' much like the 'Marx
Brothers' for film audiences of the 1930s:
They can mock each other, argue, and
have fist-fights. They can fight against their enemies, using
trickery, farming tools, and even excrement. Semar often uses
his great flatulence to lay an opponent low. They can sing and
dance, weep, beg for money, and express their fears…. Of
low status, deformed, and dependent, the punakawan might seem
to be perfect representatives of what Victor Turner calls marginality—anti-heroic,
anti-structural, the domain of those who criticize and reject
the distinctions on which a society's power structure is based.
55
|
34 |
|
| |
|
Image 6: Gareng (Photographed by author; courtesy of the University of Michigan School of Music).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Gareng's ability to fling excrement and engage in other acts of
symbolic deviance is tied to the comic nature of his misshapen form,
which marks him as outside the domain of 'human' status and structure.
A Banyumas dhalang (shadow puppeteer) has suggested that
the comic form of Gareng's body is random, only resembling the bony
arms, reddened eyes, and bulging stomach of a hookworm victim because
such exaggerations are 'naturally' humorous. Yet, other wayang
figures also appear to emulate the disfigured, diseased bodies present
within Javanese publics. In 1935, a Chinese physician noted the
'remarkable connection' between the bulging red nose of the wayang
figure Boeto and the similarly bulging, red noses of victims of
rhinoscleroma, a yaws-like disease common in Java that caused such
facial lesions. Javanese colleagues supported the Chinese physician's
claim by noting that the nasal sound (in Dutch, neusspraak)
of rhinoscleroma patients' voices, altered by the lesions, were
just like that of the shadow puppeteer's voice when playing Boeto.
56
Such instances of art similarly imitating life in the figure of
Gareng suggests a Javanese reading of the hookworm infected body-type
as comic that predated the Rockefeller Foundation projects arrival
in Banyumas. When present-day villagers in Karang Wetan talked about
the enlarged images of half-naked hookworm victims projected on
the film screens, they also recalled bursting into laughter over
such scenes. During a screening of the films for a small audience
in 2003, the image of a bony, hookworm infected man elicited laughter
again. These instances of laughing at the 'wrong' time—during
the depiction of a hookworm infected body intended to evoke fear—revealed
more than just nervousness, but perhaps a ribald reading of a Garengesque
physique.
57
|
35 |
|
While the cinematic carnival
may have opened up the Rockefeller Foundation projects to mockery
and inappropriate laughter, such apparently subversive acts did
not necessarily disrupt the process of hygiene education. In his
discussion of carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that the collective
social laughter over the lower bodily stratum holds generative powers.
58
One might read the laughter over the mantri and films as
having a similar generative power through its incitement to discourse:
after the films played and the 'outhouse technicians' made their
visits, people talked about hookworm, latrines, and feces, and did
so in particular ways. Such incitements to discourse generated evaluative
claims about bodies and cleanliness. Seeing the enlarged, hookworm
body projected on the screen may have evoked inappropriate laughter,
but that laughter also collectively defined the hookworm body as
inappropriate. It also opened a space for the mantri to enter
into homes and into the memories of Banyumas villagers as part of
a coherent narrative about their pasts. As Pak Narto, a former colonial
police officer and village official, assured me, 'after the outhouse
technicians came and showed the films, everyone in the village constructed
latrines.' |
36 |
|
Contrary to Pak Narto's claim,
not everyone in his village built latrines in the 1930s nor even
have them in the present. Some village social elite owned latrines
even before the hygiene mantri began their work, as a mark
of status and a form of association with the modernity of the late-colonial
world. Several small landholders recalled that it was only 'wong
sugih-sugih,' the wealthy, who could afford to construct the
latrines even after the mantri arrived. Bu Lilis, a female
mantri, suggested that poorer people in Banyumas were forced
(terpaksa) 'to not make them' and those who did could
rarely afford to finish the construction process. Besides the cost
of materials and the lengthy labour time—which Hydrick had
factored out of his equation—the ephemerality of the latrine,
which fills to capacity and must be dug out or replaced every several
years, served as a further deterrent to its construction. Hydrick's
sanitary 'costless' latrine was a major work of physical labour,
requiring a full week to complete (time which may have been used
to earn wages) and was prohibitively expensive for many in rural
Banyumas particularly during the economic malaise of the 1930s.
59
Yet the moralising tales of the spotlight theatre and the mantri
home visits left an endearing message that building a latrine was
the correct thing to do, a message that Pak Narto, the colonial
police officer, repeated in his invented claims about the past. |
37 |
| |
|
| Conclusion |
|
|
The creation of theatres of proof in 1930s Java fit with the Netherlands
Indies governor general's claim that '300 more years of Dutch rule'
were needed in the colony before any Indonesian autonomy could be
allowed.
60
As Latour suggests, and colonial health officials recognised, 'the
microbe is a means of action'; it enables public health institutions
to function effectively through shared notions of pathogenicity
with subject populations.
61
Forcing colonial subjects to 'share' the 'truth' about germs was
understood to be critical to the maintenance of sanitary order and
was perhaps thought to be a precondition for granting Indonesia
status as a modern, independent nation. Yet, the project of sharing
this truth about microbes was troubled by colonial ideologies of
representation and translation that raised anxieties over potential
Javanese misunderstandings of biomedical aetiologies. Hydrick's
hygiene films attempted to compensate for perceived Javanese irrationality
by creating simplified narratives that established clear links of
causality between sickness and cure. In seeking to illuminate the
presence of invisible pathogens with microscopic technologies, Hydrick
also infantilised audiences by teaching the fundamentals of magnification,
which, as Javanese viewers claimed, were already obvious. Whether
or not Javanese audiences came to 'share' the truth of germs in
the 1930s is a question that perhaps can not be answered through
recourse to memory alone; however, people's nostalgic memories for
the hygiene films reveal a parallel process of colonial power with
lasting effects even into the present. |
38 |
Hydrick understood the
value of entertainment to draw in audiences and open up their homes
to the more intimate educational visits of the hygiene mantri.
In presenting airplanes, chase scenes, and comic pratfalls, Hydrick
had fashioned what film historian Tom Gunning calls, an 'aesthetic
of attraction,' based on curiosity and 'scopic pleasure.'
62
This aesthetic enabled the hygiene projects to partially break with
the coercive police identity that characterised other forms of colonial
village authority. As a technique of power, the use of performance
to balance coercive rule has a continued history in Indonesia: after
murdering leftist puppeteers and artists during the 196566 anticommunist
massacres, President Suharto's New Order regime employed its own
legions of comedians, puppeteers, and artists to provide public
entertainment and also control the voice of mockery.
63
After the 1930s, the next time rural Banyumas Javanese recall watching
movies in the village and being treated to comedy troupes was during
the intensive birth control campaigns of the early 1970s, in the
formative stages of Suharto's rule. Rudolf Mrázek, in recalling
the film technologies of the late-colonial world, notes that
The light, and even the shadows, in
the Indies movie houses were man-made. The electric switch was
in a professional hand. These indeed, are the most impressive,
and most troubling, images of the late-colonial period: people
floodlighted, and rulers watching the light effect.
64
|
39 |
The laughter that arose from audiences watching the films was
also man-made, and listened to by rulers who tried to discern
its meaning. Yet, for all of the investment in constructing theatres
of proof in the late colonial Indies and studying their effects,
a fundamental block remained that prevented Hydrick and colonial
health authorities from fully recognising and acting on the deep
structural inequalities that prevented the construction and use
of latrines. Although most people in contemporary rural Banyumas
understand the problem of germ and parasitic contagion, this block
remains present within the logics of health policy, such that
the drainage canal that runs from the city of Purwokerto through
the villages in Banyumas is now known, jokingly, as the 'longest
toilet in Java.'
University
of Michigan
|
40 |
Notes
1. In the 1930s five
ketip was the equivalent of fifty cents, more than ten
times what a farm laborer could earn in a single day, making
the urban film screenings both distant and prohibitively expensive.
2 Bruno Latour, The
Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988), 856.
3 As Ulf Schmidt notes
in his discussion of Nazi propaganda movies 'The film camera
was seen as a machine that could not lie; the film itself as
an apparently objective representation of reality.' Ulf Schmidt,
Medical Films, Ethics, and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany
(Husum, Germany: Matthiesen Verlag, 2002), 41. On the perceived
advantage of the film medium for demonstrating links of causation
see Marianne Fedunkiw, "Malaria Films: Motion Pictures as a
Public Health Tool" American Journal of Public Health
93, no. 7 (2003): 104657. See also Martin Pernick, The Black
Stork: Eugenics and the Death of 'Defective' Babies in American
Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
4 See Lisa Cartwright,
Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
5 Kirsten Ostherr,
Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the
Discourse of World Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005), 27.
6. Cartwright,3.Cartwrightexplainsthatthe'microscopicmotionpictureisaCartwright,
3. Cartwright explains that the 'microscopic motion picture
is a mechanism through which science reorganized its conception
of the living body' (p. 82). Viewers could similarly reorganize
their own bodily conceptions around depictions of internal pathogens
and potentially learn to defer to the vital authority of health
agencies. Latour explores the construction of the microbe as
a social agent, 'not an idea floating in the head of scientists
[but] a means of locomotion for moving through the networks
that they wish to set up and command.' (Latour, 45). Beyond
the laboratory space in the sphere of public health, such networks
relied on viewers to uphold the same criteria of validity as
medical professionals who organised health interventions.
7. On film censorship
in Britain, see Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality,
19091925 (London: Routledge, 1988). For the United States
see Pernick, The Black Stork; and Ostherr, Cinematic
Prophylaxis.
8. Pernick, 121.
9. John Parascandola,
"VD at the Movies: PHS Films of the 1930s and 1940s," Public
Health Reports 111 (1996): 1736. Such studies, however,
rarely deterred public health officials, who sought to develop
more compelling film narratives and visuals that might be more
able to touch the bodily habitus of audiences.
10. Tom Gunning has
argued that viewers of early-twentieth-century films were treated
to an 'aesthetic of astonishment' that was understood to be
divorced from empirical reality. Watching Lumiere's Arrival
of a Train at the Station, in which a train appears almost to
roll into the theatre, audiences were pleasurably entranced
rather than startled in terror: 'The peculiar pleasure of screaming
before the suddenly animated image of a locomotive indicates
less an audience willing to take the image for reality than
a spectator whose daily experience has lost the coherence and
immediacy traditionally attributed to reality,' Tom Gunning,
"An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator," In Viewing Positions, edited by Linda Williams
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 126.
11. Ontheconstructionofthe'gentleman'inscienceseeStevenShapin,
On the construction of the 'gentleman' in science see Steven
Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in
Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1994).
12. Megan Vaughan,
Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 185.
13. Ibid.,
191.
14. After hearing
about the hygiene films from villagers, I searched for them
extensively in Banyumas, hoping to find some preserved in the
local archive of the Regional Health Services. The end of the
Suharto period in 1998 resulted in a reshuffling of administrative
locations. In Banyumas I was told that all old medical records
were now housed in the Department of Transportation, although
it took repeated visits before officials there would admit to
such holdings. Behind the office in a decaying unused bathroom
filled with a rusted refrigerator and empty oil cans, we found
a stack of twelve film canisters resting directly on the mouth
of a squat toilet, along with a broken projector and a film
reeling device discarded nearby. The majority of the films were
labeled with the stamp of the 1930s Medisch-Hygienisch Propaganda
Division of the Dienst der Volksgezondheid. These films
were most likely those shown in villages by the hygiene mantri
in Banyumas, as several of the villagers' recollections matched
exactly with the narrative content. The films are currently
housed in General Sudirman University's Department of Public
Health Library, Purwokerto, Central Java, Indonesia.
15. On the Rockefeller
Foundation hookworm projects see Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Armando
Solorzano, "The Hook of Hookworm: Public Health and the Politics
of Eradication in Mexico," in Western Medicine as Contested
Knowledge, edited by Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 1997); Christian Brannstrom,
"Polluted Soil, Polluted Souls: The Rockefeller Hookworm Eradication
Campaign in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 19171926,' Historical Geography
25 (1997), 2545; Marcos Cueto, "The Cycles of Eradication:
The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American Public Health,
1918-1940," in International Health Organizations and Movements,
19181939, edited by Paul Weindling (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1995); John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness:
Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); James Gillespie,
"The Rockefeller Foundation, the Hookworm Campaign and a National
Health Policy in Australia, 19111930,' in Health and Healing
in Tropical Australia and Papua New Guinea, edited by Roy MacLeod
and Donald Denoon (Townsville, Qld: James Cook University Press,
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