'Experiences of Modernity' and Psychiatry: Global Histories in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Final Report Abstract
The project investigated global negotiations of concepts of the psychological and psychiatric effects of experiences of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ in ethno-logical, psychological and psychiatric knowledge between Europe and regions of the 'Global South' in the 19th and 20th centuries. The focus was on sub-Saharan Africa. The history of discourses and practices related to the historical idea that so-called ‘primitive’ people in the tropics and subtropics would be particularly deeply traumatized and mentally ill by experiences of ‘modernization’ and that - according to many ethnologists or psychiatrists of the time - conclusions could also be drawn from this about European psychiatric diseases of ‘civilization’ and their therapy. The project was divided into three sub-projects: First, a monograph on the entangled history of regions in sub-Saharan Africa and Europe in this context for the period 1850-1980; second, a workshop on the history of ‘modernization experience’ and psychiatry in global contexts, which took place at RUG Groningen from 07.11. - 08.11.2018; and third, a corresponding anthology. The anthology, consisting of revised papers from the workshop and other contributions, will be published under the title “Psychiatric Countours. New African Histories of Madness”, co-edited with Nancy Rose Hunt, in the renowned series “Theory in Forms” to be published by Duke University Press in May 2024. Overall, the aim of the project was to present new contributions to the global and interconnected histories of psychiatric discourses and practices in relation to contemporary debates about the effects of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’. More than in previous research, seemingly humanitarian reform psychiatric approaches in the tropics and subtropics during the 19th and 20th centuries were to be examined. The perceptions and experiences of as many people involved as possible, as well as processes of the global circulation of knowledge, were to be analyzed. It was asked how normative settings of global ‘modernity’ and concepts of mental ‘illness’ and ‘madness’ were questioned, locally negotiated and pluralized during the period under study, whereby stereotypes, the definition of otherness, social inclusion and exclusion, psychological and physical violence played an important role.
Publications
-
"Die Moderne macht sie geisteskrank!". Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 41(4), 685-717.
Büschel, Hubertus
-
2021. Der Rorschach-Test reist um die Welt: Globalgeschichten aus der Ethnopsychoanalyse, Wien, Berlin
Büschel, Hubertus
-
Die Lüge vom ‚guten‘ Kolonialismus und Jean-Pierres Trauma. Historische Anthropologie, 30(1), 12-32.
Büschel, Hubertus
-
3 Mr. Tanka and Voices. A Cameroonian Patient Writing about Schizophrenia. Psychiatric Contours, 93-132.
Büschel, Hubertus
-
Coda. On the Importance of Suffering. Psychiatric Contours, 311-324.
Büschel, Hubertus
-
Psychiatric Contours.
Hunt, Nancy Rose & Büschel, Hubertus (Eds.)
