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Tongan Doctors and a Critical Medical Ethnography1

Since 2001, I have been doing research on Tongan doctors. Take a moment to reflect on that statement. What does it mean, to you? Did you experience a moment of confusion? Generally, when I say ‘I’m researching Tongan doctors’, I am met with a request for clarification. This happens even when I am speaking to other anthropologists: ‘Oh, you mean traditional medicine?’ Or, ‘Do you mean indigenous healers?’ I have even been asked: ‘You mean, um, witch-doctors, shamans, err ...?’ No. When I say ‘Tongan doctor’, I am referring to someone who has graduated from a recognised and accredited medical school, who is practising within governmentsanctioned guidelines as a professional physician, and who also happens to be indigenous to the Polynesian nation of Tonga. This paper is motivated both by the confusion I have encountered when I say ‘Tongan doctor’, and a desire to liberate the story of how Tongans came to have ‘modern’ biomedical services. I believe the confusion and the history of the first Tongans to try to become doctors have relevance for a critical ethnography of medicine. Given the self-reflexive and ‘anti-savage slot’ emphasis in contemporary anthropology, and given critical medical anthropology’s particular emphasis on the cultural situatedness of biomedicine, the puzzled responses I have encountered in professional contexts should not occur. ‘Tongan doctor’ should be no more confusing than ‘Canadian’ or ‘Australian’ or ‘French doctor’. That I have experienced these requests for clarity on several occasions, most remarkably at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 2002, implies that the kinds of essentialisms anthropologists purport to gainsay, and that the first advocates for a Pacific Islanders’ medical school faced in the early twentieth century, are still in place decades later. Juxtaposing vignettes of the colonial-era encounter between Tongans and Western medical professionals with contemporary anthropological discourses allows me both to liberate elided social histories—stories contradicting the usual assumption that elements of Western modernity are generally imposed on indigenous people—and to