body

is a social construction, meaning not that the body is unreal, but simply that it is unfinished, never static, always changing, always under construction by the forces of society and culture.

Mary-Ellen Kelm's Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-50 is explicitly concerned with the making of bodies. Drawing on both historian Roy Porter, who leans towards a material analysis of bodies in history, and Foucault, KeIm asserts that 'arguing that the body is a social construction is not to say that the body is unreal but simply that it is unfinished, always under construction by the forces of society and culture' (2001, xvii). She maintains that 'these forces are changing so that the body is never static... through its permutation the body becomes a subject of history itself' (xvii).

is central to the processes of colonization . The colonized body, (a body that eats, sleeps, moves and interacts in a certain manner) is made by the colonizing governance, the medical profession, the churches, and the provincial government.

Arguing that Aboriginal bodies were partly made 'by the colonizing governance of the Canadian state and its allies, the medical profession, the churches, and the provincial government,' she seeks to 'plot the patterns of [this] making' (xvii). The 'reshaping and 'reformation'' of Aboriginal bodies, she posits, were 'central to the processes of colonization in British Columbia' (177), and thus she investigates government policy and practice, the imposition of EuroCanadian medicine, and the ongoing presence of First Nations healers and belief systems in/on/through the bodies of First Nations people.

Mary Ellen Kelm

Authors(0)

Mary Ellen KelmThinkers

Mary Ellen Kelm