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- Convenor:
-
Nancy Rose Hunt
(University of Florida)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Health
- Location:
- Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How best should we locate, interpret, and broaden the study of madness in Africa's pasts and presents? The panel approaches madness as a capacious, shifting categories, and asks how the psychiatric meets or has combined with vernacular, expert, religious, diagnostic, and poetic modes of madness?
Long Abstract:
How best should we define, locate, interpret, and broaden the study of madness in Africa's pasts and presents? This panel proposes approaching madness as a capacious and shifting set of categories, diagnoses, and meanings, ones that stretch wide, often beyond psychiatric, pathological, pharmaceutical, racialized, colonial, and ethnopsychiatric definitions and practices. We will not neglect canonical spaces like prisons, asylums, psychiatric hospitals, schools, camps, couches, and migrant centers. Madness may be applied to individuals, families, rebels, dictators, the figurations of zany novelists, and nation-states. If sometimes madness becomes metaphor, a way of reckoning with the off-kilter, eccentric, and deranged, the word may blur into diagnostic languages for classifying symptoms, behaviors, and sounds. The connections and disruptions among such registers can be paramount: how do psychiatric categories meet - or not meet - vernacular, religious, expert, and literary modes of sizing up the strange, the frenzied, or the trance-like? This double-panel welcomes contributions from any of these senses of madness, from early modern, modernist, colonial, Cold War, decolonizing, postcolonial, and Global Mental Health moods or practices, to vernacular forms of uprising, trance, secrecy, and counter-normative practice, as well as state moods and conditions, some that border on the outlandish, the fixated, and the crazed. What is to be gained from such an extensive grasp for madness studies? Literary scholars may join historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and "psy" experts in thickening dialogue across intellectual, social, and medical spheres, enabling interactions and exchange among persons and milieus usually kept apart.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Petitions sent to colonial authorities in the 1930s & 1940s for the release of patients are understudied sources in the scholarship on psychiatry in Africa. Petitions reveal how people interacted with the Accra Asylum as they did with the "fetish shrines" that dotted the landscape of southern Ghana.
Paper long abstract:
Petitions written to colonial authorities requesting the release of patients from the Accra Asylum in the 1930s and 1940s display the perspectives of kin of suspected and confined lunatics in colonial Ghana. These sources have received little attention in previous anthropologies, histories, or sociologies of mental health in Africa. The petitions demonstrate that people interacted with the Accra Asylum much as they did with "fetish shrines" dotting the landscape of southern Ghana. Dozens of families (of different class and regional backgrounds) hoping to secure the release of their kin from the Asylum employed the same rhetorical strategy: appealing to what African petitioners and European authorities referred to as "native" or "fetish" treatment. In colonial Ghana, "fetishes" were containers for spirits and deities. They came in two forms: objects from the natural world (such as rocks and trees) or human-made ritual objects (usually composed of natural materials like bark, leaves, and hairs). The "fetishes" could be worn on the body—as amulets or "gris-gris." But the most powerful "fetishes" were kept in sacred groves or compounds glossed as "shrines." By reading petitions within the rhetorical frameworks of such Akan fetish invocations, it becomes clear that African subjects incorporated the Asylum into ritual repertoires regulating the movement of people in and out of the shrine spaces dedicated to mental healing and harming.
Paper short abstract:
L'analyse de lettres écrites par des familles pour interner un proche à l'hôpital psychiatrique de Fann permet d'explorer le thème de la folie au-delà du strict vocabulaire médical et d'interroger comment la compréhension locale de la folie rejoint ou se distancie des catégories psychiatriques.
Paper long abstract:
Cette proposition explore un recueil de lettres écrites par des familles dans les années 1960 au Gouverneur de Dakar, lui demandant son aide pour interner un proche à l'hôpital psychiatrique de Fann. Tout d'abord, je me concentrerai sur la façon dont les familles décrivent, nomment et parfois proposent un diagnostic sur les troubles mentaux que vit leur proche. En explorant les multiples représentations, compréhensions et significations des troubles mentaux, l'analyse fine des lettres montre que la folie est avant tout une catégorie labile et plastique. Plus largement, l'examen des demandes écrites d'individus permet d'explorer le thème de la folie au-delà du vocabulaire médical strict et d'interroger comment les représentations locale de la folie rejoignent ou se distancient des catégories psychiatriques.
Deuxièmement, les lettres sont écrites lorsque les personnes atteintes de maladie mentale commencent à représenter une menace pour elles-mêmes ou pour leur famille et leurs voisins. La majorité des lettres sont un appel à l'aide, les membres de la famille arguant qu'ils ne sont plus en mesure de prendre soin de leur proche, craignant pour leur propre sécurité. Ces lettres montrent que dans la grande majorité des cas, le cercle familial est le premier lieu de prise en charge des malades mentaux non agressifs. Enfin, cette présentation sera l'occasion d'aborder une question méthodologique sur l'histoire de la folie en Afrique. Il s'agit d'un appel à construire une histoire multi-située des troubles mentaux qui explore les lieux et les sources au-delà de la clinique psychiatrique.
Paper short abstract:
Je me propose de décrire et d'analyser, sur la base d'enquêtes ethnographiques menées dans la ville de Yaoundé, ce qu'on entend par 'folie naturelle'.
Paper long abstract:
En prenant comme point de départ, les productions socio-épistémiques de la folie, au premier rang desquelles sa naturalité, je voudrais montrer, dans le cadre de ce travail, comment les interprétations et conceptions 'populaires' de la folie permettent d'enrichir, par l'articulation de quatre pôles (transgression - créance - naturalité - malheur) l'idée d'une justice transgénérationnelle. Je me propose de décrire et d'analyser, sur la base d'enquêtes ethnographiques menées dans la ville de Yaoundé, ce qu'on entend par 'folie naturelle'. Je montrerai notamment qu'elle révèle une anthropologie morale de la violence dont l'imputation et la rétribution, par-delà les générations et les acteurs, constituent la clef de voûte. J'analyserai ainsi, de quelles manières, et dans quelles circonstances précises, la naturalité de la folie est considérée ici comme le rappel d'une dette non-soldée et consécutive à une transgression antérieure au sujet dont il est, malgré tout, comptable en raison des liens de consanguinité…
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the image of Africa in socialist Eastern Europe by looking at Yugoslav transcultural psychiatrists in the Global South during the Cold War. It explores the global significance of Marxist psychiatry for debates on the 'African mind' and decolonisation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the image of Africa and the Global South in socialist Eastern Europe by looking at Yugoslav transcultural psychiatrists and their missions to the Global South during the Cold War. It aims to decentre the history of global transcultural psychiatry by exploring the significance of Marxist psychiatry for debates on the 'African mind' and decolonisation. The paper looks at Yugoslav psychiatry's clinical and anthropological research in the Global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. It also explores how Eastern Europe's intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, 'primitivism' and modernity. The paper argues that socialist global involvements were ultimately driven by domestic concerns - the implicit perception of the fundamental similarity between the decolonising world and Yugoslavia/Balkans as two 'backward' and rapidly modernising regions, additionally connected through their shared experiences of social revolution. Socialist psychiatrists' special position within the emerging discipline of transcultural psychiatry was marked by both their political/ideological background and the position of Yugoslavia on the cultural and political periphery of Europe, and the paper will explore how their involvement in Africa and the non-Western world transformed transcultural psychiatry and resulted in original theoretical and conceptual interventions. These global interventions demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its quasi-colonial 'civilising mission' towards the subalterns in its own populations, and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. They also reveal that the socialist world's anti-colonialism was both revolutionary and ambiguous, bound up as it was with complex Eurocentric legacies.