Migrants, Settlers and Colonists: The Biopolitics of Displaced Bodies
| Date | 01 December 2008 |
| Published date | 01 December 2008 |
| Author | Cristiana Bastos |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2008.00487.x |
Migrants, Settlers and Colonists:
The Biopolitics of Displaced
Bodies
Cristiana Bastos*
ABSTRACT
All through the nineteenth century, Madeirans migrated from their
Atlantic island to places as remote as Hawaii, California, Guyana and,
later, South Africa. Scarcity of land, a rigid social structure, periodic
famines and rampant poverty made many embark to uncertain destinies
and endure the harsh labour conditions of sugarcane plantations. In the
1880s, a few hundred Madeirans engaged in a different venture: an
experience of ‘‘engineered migration’’ sponsored by the Portuguese gov-
ernment to colonize the southern Angola plateau. White settlements,
together with military control, scientific surveys and expeditions, contrib-
uted to strengthen the claims of European nations over specific territo-
ries in Africa. At that time, the long lasting claims of Portugal over
African territories were not matched by sponsored colonial settlements
or precise geographic knowledge about the claimed lands. There was lit-
tle else representing Portugal than the leftover structures of the slave
trade, the penal colonies and the free-lance merchants that ventured
inland. In fear of losing land to the neighbouring German, Boer and
British groups in south-western Africa, the Portuguese government tried
then to promote white settlements by attracting farmers from the main-
land into the southern plateau of Angola. As very few responded to the
call, the settlement consisted mostly of Madeiran islanders, who were
eager to migrate anywhere and took the adventure of Angola as just
another destiny out of the island where they could not make a living.
Their bodies and actions in the new place became highly surveilled by
the medical delegates in charge of assessing their adaptation. The
reports document what were then the idealized biopolitics of migration
and colonization, interweaving biomedical knowledge and political power
over displaced bodies and colonized land. At the same time, those
* Social Sciences Institute, University of Lisbon.
2008 The Author
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Journal Compilation 2008 IOM
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, International Migration Vol. 46 (5) 2008
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0020-7985
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2008.00487.x
records document the frustrations of the administration about the diffi-
culties of the settlement experience and the ways in which colonial dele-
gates blamed their failure on the very subjects who enacted and
suffered through it. The eugenicism and racialism that pervade those
writings, a currency during the age of empire, may now be out of taste
both in science and in politics; however, they are not fully out of sight,
and the subtle entrance of social prejudice into the hard concepts of
biomedical science is still with us. Learning from this example may help
analysing contemporary processes of medicalizing diversity or patholo-
gizing the mobile populations, or, in other words, the biopolitics of
migration in the 21
st
century.
MEDICINE, EMPIRE AND BIOPOLITICS
The ethnographic study of colonial archives has gathered anthropolo-
gists and historians in a vibrant field where, at least for the last two dec-
ades, both disciplines expanded their scopes and converged in methods,
preoccupations and formulations. Restricting the discussion to the issues
of medicine, health, and bodies, we can account for a number of works
that provided a multilayered understanding of the relationship between
political power, medical knowledge and the actual human experience in
the context of colonialism.
The volumes on medicine and empire edited by Arnold (1988) and by
Macleod and Lewis (1988), and the monographs on African, Asian
and Pacific settings that followed them analysed the ways in which
medicine in the colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century functioned as a tool of empire (Headrick, 1981). These works
examined how the surveillance of epidemics and sanitary campaigns
epitomized the control of the colonial state power over the bodies
and lives of the colonized peoples (e.g., Lyons, 1992; Arnold, 1993;
Manderson, 1996). Further developments included the study of colo-
nial psychiatry (Vaughan, 1991; Ernst, 1991), eventually arguing that
the categorization of the colonized peoples by the colonial authorities
changed the terms in which Foucault formulated surveillance, punish-
ment and control of individuals (Vaughan, 1991). Also addressing
Foucault explicitly, the works of Anne Stoler on Dutch colonialism
in the East Indies expanded the discussion of biopower into colonial
settings (Stoler, 1995, 2004). Other works bridged the approach to
colonialism and health and current approaches to health and migra-
tion (e.g., Marks and Worboys, 1997; Beneduce, 1998). The field
keeps alive and expanding into new sorts of approaches, including the
28 Bastos
2008 The Author
Journal Compilation 2008 IOM
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