Thesis ID: CBB001567481

Beyond the Asylum: Colonial Psychiatry in French Indochina, 1880--1940 (2013)

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Edington, Claire Ellen (Author)


Columbia University
Bayer, Ronald
Bayor, Ronald


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Advisor: Bayer, Ronald.
Physical Details: 315 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation looks beyond the asylum to consider the development of psychiatry in French Indochina as the product of everyday exchanges between lay people and experts. Drawing on archival research conducted over two years in Vietnam and France - including hundreds of patient case files - I trace the movements of patients in and out of asylums and between prisons, poor houses, youth reformatories, hospitals and family homes. Together, these individual patient itineraries challenge our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting where patients rarely left, run by experts who enjoyed broad and unquestioned authority. Instead, they reveal how ideas about what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, were debated between psychiatrists, colonial authorities and the public throughout the early decades of twentieth century. By examining the dynamics of patient movements in and out of psychiatric care, this study shifts our perspective from the asylum itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. Colonial scholars have focused on the way psychiatry provided a new scientific discourse of racial difference and how it figured within a wider biopolitics of colonial rule. However the social histories of the asylums themselves, and how they functioned within colonial political systems, remain little explored. I argue that by situating the history of psychiatry within the local dynamics of colonial rule, the asylum emerges as less of a blunt instrument for the control and medicalization of colonial society than as a valuable historical site for reframing narratives of colonial repression and resistance.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/11(E), May 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1425347612.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567481/

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Authors & Contributors
Edington, Claire Ellen
Monnais, Laurence
McCarthy, Angela
Aso, Michitake
Thabane, Motlatsi
Allmond, Gillian
Concepts
Colonialism
France, colonies
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Psychiatry
Psychiatric hospitals
Great Britain, colonies
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
Places
Vietnam
Indochina
New Zealand
Egypt
India
Lesotho
Institutions
Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro
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