Session 5: Cultural Constructions of Madness
2nd Global Conference
Monday 14th September – Thursday 17th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
On Niches and Nutters: an Alternative View
Pieter Adriaens
Tthe Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen), Belgium
One of the most fascinating questions in the history of psychiatry is what happened to ‘mentally ill’ individuals before they found a safe haven in modern mental health care. What place did they take in their communities? Were their ‘symptoms’ comparable to contemporary psychiatric symptoms? A clue to these questions is based on the observation that mental disorders are more prevalent, and more debilitating, in industrial societies than in so-called small-scale societies – traditional, family-based communities that reliably reflect the social organization of our ancestors. Medical anthropologists and, more recently, evolutionary psychiatrists, have related this disparity to the issue of societal roles. Thus they argue that modern societies lost a number of roles providing a niche for the ‘mentally ill’, including the roles of shaman and tramp. These niches, they claim, enabled such individuals to exploit, or to mask, their illness. Importantly, most of the literature on this topic seems to assume that shamans e tutit quanti are in fact psychiatric patients in disguise.
The main aim of my talk is to dispute this assumption. I will argue that becoming a shaman, for example, is not about masking mental illness, but rather about evading it by ‘choosing’ a different social trajectory. Indeed: one could say that shamans represent a socially accepted embodiment of a basic process that may also, but need not necessarily, be the starting point of mental illness. One of the major assumptions of this alternative view is that people are not born with a blueprint of a mental disorder, but rather with a ‘neutral’ neuropsychological constellation that may, in a given environment, develop into mental disorder. One of the major implications of this view is that psychiatry should perhaps supplement its therapeutic endeavours with an active search for social niches other than the role of psychiatric patient – a role that tends to exacerbate existing symptoms. In conclusion, I will illustrate this view with a case study based on my experiences as a participant observer in an adolescent psychosis unit in a mental hospital in Belgium.
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Construction of the Mad Bawas: image of the Parsis in Mumbai
Pranoti Chirmuley
Jawharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Madness as a state mind has long been debated upon by psychiatrists, at times social scientists and by philosophers like Michel Foucault. Drawing mainly from Foucault’s two central works of Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization, I choose to bring forth the idea of how mad or madness comes to be associated not with an individual but an entire community that is the Parsis in India. In this paper I would look at how such stereotypes are created about communities and how they continue to get reinforced.
Zoroastrians who fled from Persia and settled in India, almost 1200 years ago or so came to be known as Parsis as they hailed from Pars (or Persia). Over the last several decades the Parsi community has had a dual recognition, firstly for their contribution to the freedom movement, to the development/ progress of cities like Mumbai. Secondly for the image of “madness” or “insanity”, “fussiness” of this community that was and continues to recreated by the Indian cinema. In colloquial Mumbai language they are referred to as Bawas, which is assumed to be the equivalent of baba (an elderly gentleman) however there seems to be no explanation to how this term got associated with the community.
Foucault essentially looked at how the idea of the abnormal was posed vis-à-vis the normal and that of madness versus reason and rationality. He said that the modern age was pushing people to follow the norm, and denounce the abnormal or all that did not ‘fit in’ to the logic of the norm and the normal. A similar link is visible where the Indian cinema has successively typified certain regional and religious minorities. The Parsis are seen as the most progressive, divergent, modern community with very typical religio-cultural traits and apparent unwillingness to assimilate with rest of the population. This peculiarity was invariably translated into the Indian cinema, by creating the image of the mad bawa. The mad bawa was then a man who lived a different life altogether and would never part with his “eccentricity” and “fussiness”, he was a man who did not fit in with everybody else.
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The Concept of “Psycho-Resistance” and its Contribution to Caribbean Historiography
Chrisl Thomas
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad
Caribbean historiography has polarized and submerged the notion of ‘madness’. This paper attempts to create an interpretive paradigm that locates ‘madness’ within the wider context of enslaved resistance and more specifically within a unique type of resistance known as “psychoresistance”. The term psycho-resistance, coined by the author of this paper, refers to a strategy of
defence and deception used by the enslaved Africans during British Caribbean chattel slavery (1650-1838). Psycho-resistance manifested itself through behaviours commonly associated with ‘madness’ in the 19th century. Unlike “passive-resistance”, “psycho-resistance” was sometimes quite violent and manifested itself under the pretence of an ‘involuntary action’.
During chattel slavery, some enslaved Africans ‘feigned’ madness while others developed mental illnesses. Enslaved behaviours associated with these two types of madness are classified respectively as offensive psycho-resistance and defensive psycho-resistance. The concept of
psycho-resistance can be found in Afro-Caribbean proverbs, songs and folklores which are all cryptic in nature. In fact, within these sources lies the repeated concept of rebellion by intellectual deception. This idea, the nucleus of psycho-resistance, is then brought to life in slavery tracts and pamphlets, as well as in the journals written by reverends, planters and European observers throughout the period in question.
Ultimately this thesis proposes that “psycho-resistance” was an exculpatory and protean form of resistance that was practiced in converging and diverging ways amongst enslaved African men and women. Its effects were primarily economic, oftentimes specifically affecting the planter’s
capital and the productivity of his sugar estate. At other times its effects were social, leaving planters baffled and embarrassed.
Psycho-resistance is the first detailed interpretive paradigm that has been created in an attempt to explain the alleged “inconsistencies” of enslaved behaviour. At the very least it has expanded the conceptual boundaries of the Caribbean discourse on enslaved resistance by borrowing ideas and jargon from psychology and psychiatry and using them in an historical study. Indeed, it is this plural methodology that places this study in the controversial field of “Psycho-History”.
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