Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
David Bukusi
(University of Amsterdam)
Eileen Moyer (University of Amsterdam)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Health
- Location:
- Gordon Aikman Lecture Theatre
- Sessions:
- Friday 14 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to theorize the relationship between precarity, politics and psychiatry in Africa, attending to both historical and contemporary iterations. How do precarity and politics come together in African practices of psychiatry to explain/produce political and medical subjectivities
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to theorize the relationship between precarity, politics and psychiatry in Africa, attending to both historical and contemporary iterations. Historically, psychiatry has provided a lens for analyzing political subjectivities in African (colonial) contexts. Psychiatry has long served as form of governmentality in Africa, used and abused to categorize and police political threats and enforce state desires. More recently, with a rise in global mental health discourses and practices, psychiatry and psychology are being employed to help people cope with economic marginality and traumas resulting from political instabilities. Today, psychiatry also provides an avenue through which political resistance entwined with precarity is medicalized to provide a social diagnosis cum explanatory model for understanding the routine disruptions and disconnections encountered in the daily lives of African citizens. The result is that precarity, politics and psychiatric practice are often woven together in surprising and unexpected ways. Political disruptions, which are both cause and are a cause of economic precarity (itself is a site of political contestation) play out in the subtle but increasingly visible field of psychiatry and mental health. We invite papers that creatively explore the ways that discourses and claims of precarity and politics come together in different times and spaces in African practices of psychiatry to explain and produce political and medical subjectivities. What subjectivities emerge in what contexts? How is psychiatry leveraged by both states and citizens to make particular claims? To what extent are these processes shaped by economic precarity and political desires to obscure growing and potentially disruptive inequalities?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 June, 2019, -Mattia Fumanti (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
In using archival sources, the paper will explore the ways in which the illness narratives of German settlers in German South West Africa reveals the moral and political economies of the colonial world.
Paper long abstract:
While the links between colonial psychiatry, racism, and oppression figure prominently in histories of the diagnosis, treatment and institutionalisation of the mentally ill in colonial Africa, there is an absence of patient-centred accounts, in the analysis of the efforts of the colonial-era subjects themselves to be pro-active not merely as 'the mentally ill', by clinical or court definition, but as persons embedded in social relationships with their kin and significant others. Moreover, despite an emerging scholarship (Parle 2007; Swartz 1995; Wilbraham 2014), little is known of the experience of European settlers in the colonies. In this sense there is a need for a more balanced representation, one that shows the ambivalence of colonial psychiatry and its reach into the lives of the colonial subjects, Africans and Europeans alike. By focusing on the personal narratives of German colonial settlers in German South West Africa and of their efforts to escape diagnosis and institutionalisation, this paper will explore the ways in which supposedly delusional talks, far from being delusional, are often subversively political revealing the complex moral and political economies of the colonial world. In particular I will focus on the questions of change in the perception of medical interventions, shifts in the efforts at coherence and self-making as well as the complex issues of the political and moral economies of the colonial world (Good 2012; Martin 2009).
David Bukusi (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines different discourses and claims of precarity and politics that abound and continue to emerge in the space of psychiatry in Africa, focusing on a town in Kenya in the midst of ethnic tensions, violence and wealth disparities, to produce medical and political subjectivities
Paper long abstract:
Differing categories of mental health conditions (including illness) have served to embody manifestations of the intertwining and disruptiveness of politics, precarity and everyday living in Africa. This paper explores how psychiatry is leveraged by both state and citizen to make particular claims and examine the extent to which they are shaped by economic precarity and political desires obscuring disruptive inequalities. The paper is based on
twelve months of ethnographic field work at a hospital in a Kenyan town. The town has a large (local) immigrant and local (host) population pursuing widely diverse occupations in poorly paid labour and wealthy tourism and horticultural enterprises inherited from colonial occupants by the current multinationals and the wealthy local business community.
With my key interlocutors that included medical and mental health providers, through the lens of mental health, I examine the ideas and manifestations that arise around poverty and immigration, ethnicity and politics and how all these are contribute to, influence and are as a result of individual and group experiences, personal and state perspectives all further complicated by gendered, cultural v modern and global narratives.
I argue that precarity, politics and psychiatry are woven together in surprising and unexpected ways. I interrogate what psychiatric (medical) as well as political subjectivities are produced and in what contexts. I seek to understand how psychiatry is leveraged by both state and citizen to make particular claims and how these processes are shaped by economic precarity and political desires to obscure growing and potentially disruptive inequalities.
Christopher Colvin (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
This paper outlines three broad categories of subjectivity that emerged out of the work of traumatic storytelling among victims of apartheid-era political violence—virtuous, virtuoso, and virtual subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper outlines three broad categories of subjectivity that emerged out of the work of traumatic storytelling among victims of apartheid-era political violence—virtuous, virtuoso, and virtual subjectivities. The notion of the 'virtuous victim', for example, was critical in shaping not only the content of the stories victims told but also the ways in which these stories shaped their sense of their moral
selves, and the moral, social and political projects in which they were engaged. The 'virtuoso victim' was one who not only had the right 'moral to the story' but also had the capacity to deliver an engaging performance. As jarring as the notion of 'performance' might feel in relation to expressions of traumatic experiences, the performative expectations experienced by victims were real and profound, and had significant consequences for not only what kinds of stories they told, but also the ways in which these stories shaped their sense of who they were and what they could expect in return for their narrative labor. Finally, the 'virtual victim' describes a form of subjectivity rooted in the alienation of traumatic narratives, and the circulation of these stories in global "circuits of suffering" (McLagan, 2005). This idea also captures the ways in which victims came to experience the connection between storytelling and registration with the state and other institutions of economic and political power. The paper concludes with a reflection on the ways virtuous, virtuoso and virtual forms of subjectivity reinforced a troubling and constraining political landscape for victims after apartheid.
Eileen Moyer (University of Amsterdam) Danya Fast (University of British Columbia) David Bukusi (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores links between masculinity, madness and economic and social precarity, drawing on ethnographic research in urban Tanzania and Kenya. Medical anthropology provides alternative frames for understanding how psychic wounds among diverse men are made--and healed in social contexts.
Paper long abstract:
In our field sites and clinical practice in East Africa, we regularly encounter men who have become overwhelmed by "thinking too many thoughts" and "gone crazy from confusion" about the problems of life that are created by various kinds of social, economic, and political precarity. While differently inflected by age and class, these kinds of psychic afflictions affect men across the life course and socioeconomic strata. For those in the socioeconomic margins, the source of troublesome and confusing thoughts is often the daily struggle to meet basic needs. For the middle classes, it may be the struggle to continually embody this "aspirational category" (Heiman, et al. 2012) by making lucrative economic and social investments across time (Livingston 2009). Regardless of class position and age, many African men find themselves balancing on the edge of a knife between success and failure, between maintaining an affective sense of forward momentum in their everyday lives, and sinking into a sense of stagnation. While these afflictions and their solutions can be glossed using the language of stress, depression, anxiety, and suicide, such medicalizing frames may obscure more nuanced social diagnoses of what is happening to men across Africa and globally (Mains 2016; Vaughan 2012). Medical anthropology provides us with "alternative frames" (Ralph 2014) through which to understand how psychic wounds are made —and healed—among men across diverse African settings. In this paper, we explore the relationship between mental health masculinity, economic and social precarity, drawing on extended ethnographic research in urban Tanzania and Kenya.