Pretexts of American Empire in the Philippines
Historical anthropologists have recently argued that their task is not to produce coherence, but instead to depict how hierarchies of credibility are established in ways that requires a theory of inscriptions. In this paper, I argue that recent work in linguistic anthropology on entextualization and recontextualization has some crucial insights to offer into precisely this historical enterprise. In particular, I look at the ways that annual reports of public health published during the American occupation of the Philippines use erasure and incorporation in ways that minimize Filipino public health initiatives in the early twentieth century. In considering why such work was more likely to be ventriloquized than erased I complicate existing ideas about the relationship between silence and power. Textual analysis here serves to challenge the pretexts of the American imperial presence as one benefiting the health of the Filipino people, as it theorizes the relationship between silence and erasure.