Please join us on May 16, 2024 from 3:30-5:00 pm, for Kara Zamora's Dissertation talk in Medical Anthropology! This hybrid event will be held over zoom and in person at our department building. Please find more details below and we hope you'll join us!
Date/Time: May 25 | 3:30 pm-5:00 pm
Location: Zoom RSVP | In person: 490 Illinois Street, 7th Floor | Conference Room 701
Title: Chronic Pain in the Afterlife of Colonization: A Bio-Psycho-Social-Structural-Historical View Among Filipino-American U.S. Military Veterans
In this talk, I explore how histories of colonization and war come to reside and persist in peoples’ bodies as felt pain. I examine these topics as they relate to Filipinos, the multiple colonialisms of the Philippines, and how the afterlife of American colonization and militarization of the Philippines informs health outcomes among Filipino-Americans today against the backdrop of the Philippine diaspora and how Filipinos are racialized through the lens of the Model Minority Myth.
Chronic pain remains among the most diagnosed medical conditions in the U.S., with veterans experiencing chronic pain at disproportionately higher rates (40%) compared to the civilian general population (25%). Among veterans, chronic pain is a condition overwhelmingly tied to U.S. military service. These concerns with pain and histories of warfighting and colonization become more acute among Filipino soldiers and veterans, who have participated in U.S. war efforts since American colonization of the Philippines (1898-1946), with the Philippines remaining the highest source of foreign-born U.S. military personnel today.
I make a case for how, among socially marginalized people, expressions of pain—bodily, psychic, and emotional—often point to deeper dynamics of ongoing harm, both historically and in the present. Given this, I propose an expanded and historically situated framework for examining chronic pain in the clinic, in medical anthropological studies on pain and social suffering, and in emerging literatures on Asian-American and Filipino-American health.