ABSTRACTS: 21^ST MAY WORKSHOP

“The Psychology of Rebellion: Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa”

Sloan Mahone, Oxford University

On Christmas Eve 1911, the District Commissioner of Machakos wrote a lengthy sworn statement as a witness to the ‘recent outbreak of mania’ that had infected his region of Kenya Colony. The story of this epidemic and others like it would be recounted over the years as “remembered evidence” depicting the predisposition of the African ‘native’ to episodes of mass hysteria. The salience of such ideas was often apparent in the face of increasing social tension, subversive charismatic leadership, and a proliferation of prophetic movements. My interests here are the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of ‘rebellious types’ in society that often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were ‘diagnosed’ as ‘epileptic’, ‘neurotic’ or suffering from ‘religious mania’. Specifically, this paper situates colonial responses to increasing political agitation in East Africa within an intellectual climate that saw the emergence of the new medical speciality of tropical medicine in tandem with conceptual shifts taking place in British psychiatry and neurology. This paper seeks to show how these scientific disciplines were transformed within this environment as they became tied to outmoded, but resilient, beliefs about ‘the tropics’, and how this process became an important factor in the psychological rationale behind colonial rule in East Africa.

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“Thinking With Ngangas: Reflections on Embodiment and the Limits of Objectively Necessary Appearances”

Stephan Palmié, University of Chicago

This paper attempts to use the Afro-Cuban concept of the nganga (a power object activated by a bound spirit of a dead human being) as an analytical tool for understanding the legal, moral, and economic quandaries thrown up by new medical technologies (such as transplant surgery, surrogacy, the commercial immortalization of cell lines, or the patenting of genetic material) that appear to undermine conventional understanding of the boundaries between persons and objects in contemporary western cultures. In doing so, I am not arguing that forms of thought exogenous to western capitalist rationality can help to relativize its historical and cultural specificity. Rather, I suggest that forms of knowledge and ritual practice developed by populations exposed in particularly radical ways to capitalist forms of objectification and exchange may throw into relief some of the otherwise disavowed features of the moral (dis-)order from which both capitalist rationality and Afro-Cuban religion jointly emerged. The ostensibly paradoxical convergence of the forensic, medical, economical, and magical in contemporary techniques of constituting embodiment and property are thus not anomalies induced by the lagging cultural accommodation of technological change, but historically cogent outgrowths of a particular system of practices and rationalizations based on systematic, and systematically necessary, forms of misrecognition.

“Primitive Stress: Fantasy, Excitement, and 'Voodoo Death'”

Otniel E. Dror, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In 1942 Walter B. Cannon, head of the Department of Physiology at the Harvard Medical School, published his now-famous essay on “’Voodoo’ Death.” In this study, Cannon elucidated the mechanisms responsible for the detrimental physiological effects of “magic” spells or “voodoo” rituals in “primitive” societies.

The subject of “Voodoo Death” engaged and negotiated several important late nineteenth and early twentieth century concerns that lay at the boundaries between mainstream and fringe, alternative and orthodox, and subversive and normative. Questions relating to the relationships between science and the occult, knowledge and emotions, colonial and indigenous people, and—particularly in the United States—black and white Americans, as well as between women and men were all implicated in Cannon’s “Voodoo Death” study.

In my presentation I will situate Cannon’s “Voodoo Death” essay within these different contexts. I will study the status of the mechanism for subjugating voodoo death—emotional “excitement”--and examine the new and fascinating laboratory model that explained how voodoo caused death.

I will also argue that post-war authors transformed the ‘primitive’ into the emblem of that very process that previously had distinguished between it and the West—modern Civilization—and that its new guise—as acute “stress”--presented a profound concern with the unpredictable in modern Western society.