The Body, the Building, and the Garden. Reconfiguration of the Kampung by Health Institutions in the Netherlands East Indies

by Nanda Nugraha

The Body, the Building, and the Garden.

Reconfiguration of the Kampung by Health Institutions in the Netherlands East Indies

‘The Body, The Building, and The Garden’ examines how hygiene discourse was instrumentalised as a colonial technology of control in the Dutch East Indies, focusing on the reconfiguration of the Javanese kampung—the native village—as a key site of biopolitical intervention. Drawing on archival materials including medical records, exhibition catalogues, visual propaganda, and intergovernmental proceedings, the thesis posits that the Dutch colonial state used the language and practices of public health not merely to combat disease, but to reorganise Indigenous environments, extract labour more efficiently, and legitimise its authority under the guise of moral progress.

Situating this analysis within a broader intellectual genealogy, the research traces how nineteenth-century European medical science—particularly germ theory—intersected with urban reform and architectural modernity. It shows how the hygienist discourse that shaped modernist architecture in Europe, rooted in laboratory aesthetics and microbial anxiety, was translated into colonial geographies where it justified the surveillance, disciplining, and redesign of native spaces.

Through a materialist lens informed by Foucault’s biopolitics and Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of epistemic anxiety, the thesis reveals hygiene not as a humanitarian project, but as a strategic instrument within a broader colonial apparatus that transformed Indigenous environments into objects of knowledge, intervention, and economic exploitation.