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'A German whore and no money at that’ : insanity and the moral and political economies of German South West Africa

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Date
09/2020
Author
Fumanti, Mattia
Keywords
Mental illness
Narratives
Feminist ethics
Gender
Moral and political economies
German South West Africa
BF Psychology
GN Anthropology
R Medicine
T-NDAS
BDC
R2C
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Abstract
While the links between colonial psychiatry and racism figure prominently in histories of the diagnosis, treatment and institutionalisation of the mentally ill in Africa, there is an absence of patient-centred accounts, in the analysis of the efforts of the colonial-era subjects themselves to be pro-active not merely as the mentally ill, by clinical or court definition, but as persons embedded in social relationships with their kin and significant others. Moreover, despite an emerging scholarship, little is known of the experience of European settlers. In this respect there is a need for a more balanced representation, one that shows the ambivalence of colonial psychiatry and its reach into the lives of colonial subjects, Africans and Europeans alike. In this paper I focus on the narratives of a settler in German South West Africa and her efforts to escape diagnosis and institutionalisation. In building on a feminist approach to illness narratives, in particular on the idea of bearing empathic witness, I will explore the ways in which illness narratives can reveal the complex moral and political economies of the colonial world.
Citation
Fumanti , M 2020 , ' 'A German whore and no money at that’ : insanity and the moral and political economies of German South West Africa ' , Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry , vol. 44 , no. 3 , pp. 382-403 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-019-09663-4
Publication
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-019-09663-4
ISSN
0165-005X
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
Funding: Wellcome Trust Seed Award (203846/Z/16/Z).
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18954

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