African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return

African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return

Abstract: West Africans were far from passive victims of European-imposed psychiatric concepts and institutions. Rather, they enchanted the British colonial asylum in Accra (contemporary Ghana) by accommodating European psychiatric practices principally as experiences within the dynamic tapestry of African ritual and political concerns over territorial control, bodily afflictions, and psychological belonging within families, communities, and states. African people mobilized practices associated by the mid-nineteenth century with healing and harming at shrines of territorial spirits to politically harness the development of psychiatric social control. That is, European psychiatry did not colonize African minds, nor did it displace African psychotherapeutic norms. It was instead built on and grafted onto a repertoire of African healing and harming practices through socio-economic, political, and ritual transactions that, in the case of coastal Ghana, unfolded over the course of centuries.

Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Yale School of Medicine. An anthropologist and historian by training, Quarshie examines the relationship among mental healing, political expulsions, immigration, and urban belonging in West Africa since the seventeenth century.

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This event is hosted by Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Resarch on Mental Health in partnership with the Raphael Samuel History Centre and will be followed by a wine reception.