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 Control
The 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
Summary
Opposition 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