At a recent conference entitled “Iraqi Studies: Past, Present and Futures” (Columbia University, 27-28 February 2020), the problematic framing of knowledge production about Iraq was apparent yet again. The most striking example of this was that the keynote panel of four speakers did not include any Iraqi scholars. Historically, Iraq and Iraqis have been used and perceived in western contexts as objects of knowledge production. The final roundtable discussion addressed the question of how to transform and decolonize a field burdened by a long history of “extraction” of knowledge, both in the context of Iraq’s colonial past and amid more recent imperialist interventions. Omar Dewachi’s book presents a welcome contribution to a growing body of scholarship that not only critically engages with that history and the present-day empirical realities of Iraqis but also is invested in transforming the interdisciplinary study of Iraq. Ungovernable Life provides a compelling history of modern Iraq and imperial modes of governance by focusing on the role of doctors and medical institutions.
The history of medicine in Iraq, narrated in an eloquent and insightful manner by Dewachi, emerges as an important lens for anyone interested in Iraqi politics and society more broadly. This might not be a revelation for medical anthropologists, but the critical study of medicine is very much in its infancy in Iraqi Studies. The only other scholar who has explored the history of medicine in Iraq in any depth, Sara Farhan, challenges an earlier focus on external influences, particularly the British colonial power, and roots the beginnings of Iraq’s medical infrastructure in the Ottoman period. She argues that “modern medicine in Iraq was not an external interjection that manifested as a result of and progressed due the country’s interactions with the west. It is a rich and complex process that highlights the lived experiences of numerous actors composing, working alongside and against the structures that aimed to codify their societies using biomedicine” (Farhan, 2019: 25-26).
This specific debate is far beyond my own expertise, but I am interested in two aspects of Farhan’s approach and interpretation that resonate with my own dilemmas and challenges when working on Iraq. First, our sources, the kinds of archives we use and the people we chose to engage with, will influence the narratives that emerge. Our respective positionalities and epistemological starting points, in turn, will influence where we search and look for our data. Given Dewachi’s unique insights as a trained physician and former medical practitioner in Iraq with close ties to Iraqi doctors in the diaspora (particularly Beirut and London), I expected a close engagement with the lived experiences of doctors and patients. As an anthropologist, but also someone with personal ties to Iraq, I had been longing to learn more about Iraqi perspectives on the centrality of medicine to the development of the modern Iraqi nation-state and society, and Dewachi’s book both informs and opens up questions on this. The interviews with Iraqi doctors seeking asylum in the UK, such as Ammar, Hasan and Saad (Chapter 7), nuance and, crucially, humanize our understanding of the compelling overall narrative presented by Dewachi.
Second, I had long wondered about the diversity and agency of Iraqi doctors who were differently positioned vis a vis the colonial project, and subsequent Iraqi governments, including the Ba’th regime. Aside from different political views and affiliations, places of origin, class, ethnic and religious backgrounds, I was curious about the gendered aspects of developing and institutionalizing medicine in Iraq against a backdrop of a radically changing political economy, particularly during period of the most comprehensive economic sanctions system ever imposed on a country (1991-2003). Here again, I appreciated Dewachi’s discussion of the role of the General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW) during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). The GFIW was central to the modernizing discourses on hygiene in the 1970s and it became essential in the national child survival campaign to lower infant mortality (Chapter 6). Insights and also questions that emerge here link both to the gendered division of labor within institutionalized medicine and to how Iraq’s medical institutions contributed to changing gender regimes over the last decades.
These are not areas or questions that Dewachi himself may have been able to pursue in this book, but it is clearly a sign of original and excellent scholarship that the book opens up many questions and research trajectories. His work clears a path for a whole new body of research.
References
Dewachi, Omar (2017) Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Farhan, Sara (2019). “The Making of Iraqi Doctors: Reproduction in Medical Education in Modern Iraq, 1869 – 1959”. PhD Dissertation, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 2019, pages 25-26