Vient de paraître : Amster, Ellen, Medicine and the Saints : Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2013.

320 pages, $60.00 hardcover, ISBN-10 : 0292745443,ISBN-13 : 978-0292745445

Exploring the colonial encounter between France and Morocco as a process of embodiment, and the Muslim body as the place of resistance to the state, this book provides the first history of medicine, health, disease, and the welfare state in Morocco. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, this book traces a history of colonial embodiment through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic Sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France, 1877 to 1956 : international espionage and a doctor’s murder, disease and revolt in Moroccan cities, a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives, and the search for national identity in the welfare state. Each chapter addresses a different theoretical problem in the history of science and thus draws upon a range of historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in French and Arabic, Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, and historians ; a social history of the transformations occasioned by medical interventions ; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists, midwives, and ordinary patients have appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. This research reveals how Moroccans have ingested and digested French science and use it to create a modern polity and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body has become the seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contest and redefine the political.

Table of Contents

 Introduction. Colonial Embodiments

 Chapter 1. Healing the Body, Healing the Umma : Sufi Saints and God’s Law in a Corporeal City of Virtue

 Chapter 2. Medicine and the Mission Civilisatrice : A Civilizing Science and the French Sociology of Islam in Algeria and Morocco, 1830–1912

 Chapter 3. The Many Deaths of Dr. Émile Mauchamp : Contested Sovereignties and
Body Politics at the Court of the Sultans, 1877–1912

 Chapter 4. Frédéric Le Play in Morocco ? The Paradoxes of French Hygiene and Colonial Association in the Moroccan City, 1912–1937

 Chapter 5. Harem Medicine and the Sleeping Child : Law, Traditional Pharmacology, and the Gender of Medical Authority

 Chapter 6. A Midwife to Modernity : The Biopolitics of Colonial Welfare and Birthing a Scientific Moroccan Nation, 1936-1956

 Epilogue. Epistemologies Embodied : Islam, France, and the Postcolonial

Dr. Ellen Amster, Associate Professor, Co-Coordinator, Certificate of Middle East and North African Studies Department of History, Holton Hall 326

Phone : 414-229-4749