Internationalism and Health

DATE LECTURER2/28/2013 Aaron Pascal Mauck MA, PhD

Internationalism and Health

Local Responses to Colonial Medicine

I. Medicine and Social Control

II. The Psychopathology of the Colonized

III. The Psychopathology of Colonization

IV. Postcolonial Responses

Medicine and Social Control

Prior to the twentieth century, medicine primarily Functions to protect colonizers, not the colonized

- environmental determinism suggests that Europeans are at greater risk than natives tropical climates

- a nearly unlimited labor supply in many colonial states, coupled with limited state resources, limits colonial interest in protecting the health of native workers

- emphasis is placed on policing borders as a means of controlling the spread of disease (the border between the colonial center and the colonial periphery, and the border between white and non-white bodies in the colonies themselves)

Medicine and Social ControlConstructive Colonialism increases the importance ofMedicine as a colonial function. Medicine becomesA form of politics by other means:

- Greater coordination between industry and the state for the extraction of raw materials places a premium on the health of workers as a prerequisite for efficient production (less the case where labor supply remains inexhaustible)

- Germ theory and tropical medicine bring new experts and expertise to the colonies, leading to new forms of intervention predicated on eradicating disease in the environment as well as in black and white bodies

- Medicine comes to be represented as a depoliticized social good, even as the benefits of other aspects of colonialism are starting to be questioned

Medicine and Social ControlThe depoliticized nature of colonial medicine allows it toperform ostensibly political acts in the name of science with little threat of challenge from the colonial center

- Quarantine and isolation of individuals without consent

- Treatment of individuals with little or no consent

- Eviction from insanitary housing

- Forced migration from insanitary areas

- Forced changes in agricultural production techniques

- Destruction of crops

- Institutionalization and incarceration

The Psychopathology of the Colonized

The rise of the Protectorate Model of Governance in the Thirtiesplaces a new emphasis on bringing European medical knowledge and practices to the colonial periphery as a tool of colonial self-development– including psychiatric knowledge and practices

The model of shared political control leads to tensions between ostensiblyuniversal, objective, and depoliticized medical knowledge and its the application in colonial settings experiencing different political and Economic realities

The limited economic resources offered by the colonial center for medical and public health services leads to a basic disjuncture betweenColonial promises and colonial realities

Similarly, perceived failures of shared leadership and economic development manifest themselves in the form of poor life chances for manyColonized peoples. By the forties, this increasingly finds expression in calls for full independence

The Psychopathology of Colonization

Double-Consciousness:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder

W.E.B. Du Bois

Born in Martinique in 1925, his interest in racism and colonialism

stems in part fromHis experience with Vichy French

Navaltroops during WWII. Fanon Fled

Martinique as a Gaullist and fought in North Africa with the Allied Forces.

Qualifies as a psychiatrist in 1951, serves as a psychiatrist in Algeria

from 1954-1957

In Algeria, he developed socio-therapy, which connected treatment to the cultural backgrounds of his

patients. From this position he challenged prevailing

representations of colonial madness or the “dependence syndrome” as

psychological phenomena independent of social and

Economic conditions.

The Psychopathology of Colonization

Frantz Fanon

The Double-Consciousness of the colonized might have led to destructive psychic effects, but these effects could not be isolated from the conditions of colonialismItself. This suggested that colonialism itself was a principle source of psychosis.

Algerian War (1954-1962)

Protracted war of Algerian independence from France.

represents an Important step in the development of postcolonial ideology

Although characterized by extremeviolence on both sides, this violence

Came to be represented byAdvocates of independence (like Fanon)

As a legitimate form of political engagement, but was often

Represented by the French as Illustrating the “return of the repressed”

Among the colonized.

Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960)

Kenyan anticolonial uprising largely related To the expropriation of Kikuyu land and

Consequent transformation of subsistenceFarmers into landless laborers.

Suppressed by the British by isolating the Kikuyu tribe from other ethnic groups

in Kenya, and relocating suspected Mau Mau to work camps.

Official British report of the uprising ignored

Social and economic explanations linked to

The effects of colonialism in favor of a psychoanalytic explanation offered byThe ethnopsychiatrist JC Carothers.

In the report, the uprising was presented as "an irrational force of evil, dominated by bestial impulses

and influenced by world communism.”

Representations of Mau Mausuppress politics in favor of

depoliticized,psychoanalytically suggestive images of tribal peoples in the grip of madness

Longstanding association betweentribalism and madness (or irrationality)

-anthropological assessmentsof magical practices or ecstatic states

-popular representations of uncontrolled violence or sexuality

Colonial psychiatry thus functions totransform legitimate political claims

into expressions of mental illness, just as

colonial medicine sometimes functionsto transform social or economic

problemsInto purely medical problems

SummaryOpposition to the cultural, political, and economic consequences of Colonialism often constructed as a form of psychopathology from

The teens until the sixties.

This representation meant that psychiatry (and to some extent medicineas a whole) worked to encourage colonial control in a depoliticized way,

Even as more explicitly political advocacy of colonialism fell out of fashion

Anticolonial and Postcolonial ideology reconceptualize representationsOf colonial madness as legitimate reactions to the conditions colonized

peoples encounter, and use incidences of madness to justify claimsfor independence