Danzhou Camp 1
Complicit Bodies and Environments –
Medical Anthropology in Tropical Island Public Health Systems
Keywords
Danzhou, located in western Hainan Island, is one of China's southernmost tropical cities. Its geographical position and climatic features create a unique eco-disease structure: high temperatures, humidity, and monsoon cycles provide sustained conditions for various tropical diseases (e.g., dengue fever, malaria, enteric diseases, and parasitic infections). Simultaneously, its marginal island ecology restricts equitable healthcare resource distribution, resulting in a structurally imbalanced local medical system amid modernization.
Within this context, Danzhou’s public health landscape is not merely shaped by state interventions and infrastructure development but also emerges as a dynamic field where ecological conditions, local knowledge, and cultural perceptions interact. The so-called "co-production of body and environment" rejects the notion of the body as a passive vessel of disease, instead framing it as a fluid existence shaped by climate, dietary patterns, healthcare systems, labor practices, and more. This perspective urges us to move beyond biomedical paradigms and re-examine definitions of "health" through cultural-political and eco-anthropological lenses.
This course takes Frédéric Keck’s work on "sentinel devices and preparedness society" as a theoretical entry point to explore how disease becomes a nexus of social organization and cultural imagination. For Keck, health crises are not just biological events but negotiations among state power, scientific knowledge, and uncertainty—a process particularly fraught in island societies.
Meanwhile, Didier Fassin argues that public health is fundamentally biopolitical, laying bare how societies hierarchize the value of lives—determining which are protected and which are neglected.
We further integrate Judith Farquhar’s insights to ground "the body" in everyday practices. In her seminal work Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China, Farquhar posits that the body is "not merely a biological fact or a target of governance but a site for sensing the world, regulating life, and generating meaning." Chinese medicine and wellness traditions, she contends, are less about "cure" than "arts of everyday existence."
It is within what Judith Farquhar terms the "cultural thickness of bodily experience" that we comprehend how Danzhou residents navigate the island's humid tropical ecology—adjusting dietary hot/cold balances, daily rhythms, cupping/massage therapies, and herbal remedies—to cultivate bodies "suited to this place." These mundane practices simultaneously constitute micro-responses to state health discourses and a living process of cultural production.
In Danzhou, communities routinely rely on folk clinics, herbal markets, and self-care traditions to manage illness, forming a health culture deeply synchronized with natural cycles. This system reveals not only the fusion of ecology and knowledge but also the systemic inaccessibility and illegibility of state healthcare in grassroots society.
The course will immerse students in Danzhou’s neighborhoods, hospitals, and herbal markets through participant observation, oral history collection, and health belief interviews, constructing a critical framework between "official knowledge" and "local praxis."
"The co-production of body and environment" is no abstraction but a lived logic manifest in Danzhou’s socio-ecological reality. Here, students will interrogate not just biomedical definitions of "disease," but how illness becomes socially constructed—perceived, managed, and reproduced through ecological and cultural vocabularies. This is a course about bodies, but more crucially, a biopolitical lesson on human-nature coexistence and confronting uncertain futures.
Online / Offline Classes + Offline Fieldwork
Danzhou Camp 1 – Faculty Resources
