Talk by Nana Osei Quarshie (Yale)
Thursday 3rd April 2025, 6.00pm, followed by a wine reception
Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, University of London, 25-27 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL (in-person only)
Book here (QuarshieLecture.eventbrite.co.uk).
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.
For information please contact Katy (k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk)
Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health (CIRMH) in partnership with the Raphael Samuel History Centre funded by UKRI and the Wellcome Trust
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