Existing sociological research on global health pay attention to how medical scientific knowledge and practices become diffused, and in some cases interact with national – local institutional arrangements to engender distinct biopolitical formations and health morality. However, scant consideration has been given to how the very science underlying these ideas change as they travel. Borrowing perspectives from the sociology of scientific knowledge and postcolonial sociology, this presentation builds on the literature on global health by elucidating how medical scientific ideas such as the thrifty gene hypothesis, posited by American geneticist James Neel in 1962 to explain the high prevalence of type 2 diabetes among certain ethnoracial groups, was transformed as it encountered the postcolonial politics in the Asia Pacific region.
Following research on diabetes causality and public facing diabetes messaging in Singapore and island Oceania between 1960-2000, a period which also saw efforts to internationalise and standardise diabetes by multilateral health institutions such as the World Health Organization, Bin Khidzer first presents how the thrifty gene hypothesis converged with local and regional ethnoracial classification systems to reproduce moralized public health messaging that sought to discipline the genetics and behavior of ‘at risk’ minorities.
Secondly, Bin Khidzer shows how the hypothesis was mobilized by postcolonial scientific and political actors who exploited the interpretive flexibility of the ‘environment’ in the hypothesis to recreate an understanding of diabetes causality that emphasized postcolonial progress but more importantly, that pushed for the recognition and reckoning of colonial history in understanding population health.
