Abstract
How directly relevant was clinical psychiatry to imperialism? Both evidently developed in the same period. They shared certain modes of reasoning. We might note, for instance, affinities between the scientific objectification of illness experience as disease and the objectification of people as chattel slaves or colonial manpower;2 both argued for an absence of ‘higher’ functions or sense of personal responsibility among patients and non-Europeans. The extent, however, to which an elaborated set of ideas which might be termed ‘imperial psychiatry’ provided a rationale for colonialism in British Africa or India3 is debatable: in recent reviews I have argued that the evidence is fairly meagre. With remarkably few exceptions,4 the small number of colonial psychiatrists barely participated in the theoretical debates of early cultural psychiatry: segregated facilities, of course;5 prejudice and neglect, undoubtedly; but hardly practicable ideologies for racial or cultural inferiority.
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Part of this material was published in Pathology and Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad (Cambridge: 1993) and ‘Psychiatry’s Culture’, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 42 (1996) 245–68.
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Notes
D. Bhugra, and R. Littlewood (eds), Colonialism and Psychiatry (Delhi: 2001).
J. McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the African Mind’ (Cambridge: 1995).
See, B.J.F. Laubscher, Sex, Custom and Psychopathology: A Study of South Africa Pagan Natives (London: 1937);
G. Tooth, Studies in Mental Illness in the Gold Coast (London: 1950);
J.C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease (Geneva: 1953).
F.D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: 1929);
W. Ernst, Mad Tales From the Raj: The European Insane in British India (London: 1991).
G. Tooth, Studies in Mental Illness in the Gold Coast (London: 1950).
O. Mannoni, Psychologie de la Colonisation (Paris: 1950).
J. McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the African Mind’ (Cambridge: 1995).
L. Mars, La Lutte Contre La Folie (Port-au-Prince: 1946);
F. Fanon, Peau Noir, Masques Blanches (Paris: 1952).
P.A. Taguiett, La Force du Prejugé: Essais sur le Racism et ses Doubles (Paris: 1988);
M.A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: 1994).
J. Goody, The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970 (Cambridge: 1995).
M. Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: 1992).
R. Littlewood, ‘Jungle madness’, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 31 (1985) 194–197;
W. Ernst, Mad Tales From the Raj: The European Insane in British India (London: 1991).
A. Brigham, Remarks on the Influence of Mental Cultivation upon Health (Hartford, NY: 1882).
B. Rush, ‘Observations intended to favour a supposition that the black colour (as it is called) of the Negroes is derived from the Leprosy’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 4 (1799) 289–297.
The exception is Kenya. See, J.C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease (Geneva: 1953).
L.E. Fisher, Colonial Madness: Mental Health in the Barbadian Social Order (New Brunswick: 1985).
Barry Chevannes, a Jamaican anthropologist, has argued that Rasta dreads were initially an imitation of derelicts or the mad in 1950s Kingston. See, B. Chevannes, ‘The phallus and the outcast’, in B. Chevannes, Rastafari and Other African Caribbean Woridviews (London: 1995).
P. Wilson, Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean (New Haven: 1973).
K. Warner, The Trinidad Calypso (London: 1982), p. 96.
H. Rodman, Lower-Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad (New York: 1971), p. 217.
K. Warner, The Trinidad Calypso (London: 1982), p. 102;
H. Rodman, Lower-Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad (New York: 1971), p. 214.
D. Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (Oxford: 1972), p. 141.
G. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (Kingston: 1983), p. 178.
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© 2007 Roland Littlewood
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Littlewood, R. (2007). Madness, Vice and Tabanka: Post-colonial Residues in Trinidadian Conceptualisations of Mental Illness. In: Mahone, S., Vaughan, M. (eds) Psychiatry and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_10
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