“Ick!” “Eeew!” “Gross!” “Yuck!” “Kadiri!” “Baboy!” These are terms you hear every day when Filipinos are confronted by someone or something disgusting. The preferred exclamation, of course, reflects social class, but that is a topic for another column.

At the last meeting of the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE), water recycling was discussed and everyone agreed that clean potable water would be one of the critical issues of this century. Nobody was keen on using recycled water at home. Water that is not clear and odorless is considered unclean. Even I could not imagine astronauts drinking their own recycled, filtered, and purified urine while traveling in space.

Our aversion to germs comes from the way we are taught in schools, as well as the way our parents raised us because they too went through schools where they were warned against germs and instructed in basic sanitation. In the days before water dispensers and bottled water, my mother would boil our drinking water. She would not allow us to use suspect drinking vessels when we were out of the house. So if she did not have her portable cooler with frozen water in covered plastic tumblers, she would fashion a small drinking cup from clean paper for us to use. My mother’s formative years were spent in a pre-war public school that inculcated sanitary practices that she passed on to her children and grandchildren.

Memories of home and mother came flooding in as I read Warwick Anderson’s “Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines” (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007), which argues that part of the “civilizing process” brought by the Americans to the Philippines had something to do with health and hygiene.

Travel accounts of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century contain many descriptions of how beautiful the archipelago was and how filthy the people were. Americans made reference to their servants and how they were taught to wash their hands, cut their nails, fix their hair, and wear clean, pressed clothing. An Englishwoman in Iloilo named Campbell Dauncy related her irritation with her neighbors because they threw the urine, collected from piss pots at night, into the street when they went out in the morning. Other accounts record that a warning was yelled out before this was done, “Agua se va” (Water is coming)! so that people in the street knew what to do. To discourage the neighbors from doing so Dauncy’s husband would yell at offenders and call them “Baboy!” That almost always did the trick.

Another Englishman, O. J. Younghusband, narrated the sanitary activities of the Americans who excavated mountains of accumulated excrement from under the houses in Manila. It seems there was no proper way of disposing waste or mixing these into the soil for fertilizer during the Spanish period. This was true both in bahay na bato of the elite as well as the nipa huts of humbler folk, where the pigs and chickens under the house provided elementary waste disposal or recycling.

In our days, we still see the traces of American period sanitary campaigns and education in signs that read “Bawal umihi dito” (Don’t urinate here). Worse, I saw a sign near the entrance of Balayan church in Batangas years ago that screamed, “Igalang ang tahanan ng Diyos. Huwag tumae ditto.” (Respect the house of God. Do not defecate here.)

Our Department of Tourism gives awards to clean toilets, when these should actually be the norm not the exception. Chapter 4 of Anderson’s book, entitled “Excremental Colonialism,” is an engaging read because in 1912 the Bureau of Health in Manila declared that human waste was “more dangerous than arsenic and strychnine” and that “dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, and kindred diseases are conveyed to a person regardless of whether he be king or peasant, with minute organisms that, probably have passed through the bowels of another person.”

Filipinos were described as “promiscuous defecators” who didn’t see their “evacuated intestinal contents as a poison.” Of course, they were contrasted with the Americans who were scrupulously clean, responsible, and “retentive.” Freudian analysts will have a lot to interpret from Filipino toilet behavior.

I have written a number of columns on American sanitation before, like the collection and proper disposal of “night soil,” but until I read “Colonial Pathologies” I never saw all this as part of the American mission to civilize the Filipinos. Anderson had a point when he put all these in the context of race and colonialism. It’s a fascinating study because while the Americans tried to adapt to life in the tropics, they also had to change some of the ways Filipinos lived through education and the founding of the Bureau of Science and the Bureau of Health. It was not only morals that they sought to teach, but control of the body as well, especially what came out of the mouth (no spitting and no expectorating campaigns) and anus (introduction of flush toilets, sewage, and collection).

Anderson mentions that in 1909, the Bureau of Science had examined over 7,000 fecal specimens and at the beginning of the 1914 cholera epidemic the bureau had 126,000 jars of feces!

Not very engaging topics indeed but worth a second look in the light of our colonial history.

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu