Internationalism and Health

1. Internationalism and Health Local Responses to Colonial Medicine Aaron Pascal Mauck MA, PhD 2/28/2013 DATE LECTURER

2. Medicine and Social Control • The Psychopathology of the Colonized • The Psychopathology of Colonization • Postcolonial Responses

3. 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)

4. Medicine and Social Control • Constructive Colonialism increases the importance of • Medicine as a colonial function. Medicine becomes • A 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

5. Medicine and Social Control • The depoliticized nature of colonial medicine allows it to • perform 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

6. The Psychopathology of the Colonized The rise of the Protectorate Model of Governance in the Thirties places 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 ostensibly universal, 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 between Colonial promises and colonial realities Similarly, perceived failures of shared leadership and economic development manifest themselves in the form of poor life chances for many Colonized peoples. By the forties, this increasingly finds expression in calls for full independence

7. 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

8. The Psychopathology of Colonization Born in Martinique in 1925, his interest in racism and colonialism stems in part from His experience with Vichy French Naval troops 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. Frantz Fanon

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

10. Algerian War (1954-1962) Protracted war of Algerian independence from France. represents an Important step in the development of postcolonial ideology Although characterized by extreme violence on both sides, this violence Came to be represented by Advocates 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.

11. Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960) Kenyan anticolonial uprising largely related To the expropriation of Kikuyu land and Consequent transformation of subsistence Farmers 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 by The 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.”

12. Representations of Mau Mau suppress politics in favor of depoliticized, psychoanalytically suggestive images of tribal peoples in the grip of madness Longstanding association between tribalism and madness (or irrationality) -anthropological assessments of magical practices or ecstatic states -popular representations of uncontrolled violence or sexuality Colonial psychiatry thus functions to transform legitimate political claims into expressions of mental illness, just as colonial medicine sometimes functions to transform social or economic problems Into purely medical problems

15. 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 medicine as 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 representations Of colonial madness as legitimate reactions to the conditions colonized peoples encounter, and use incidences of madness to justify claims for independence