Complex microcosms: asylums and treatments, 1900–1950

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Snelders
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Christian Churches

This chapter explores the modern leprosy asylums in Suriname. In the modern Catholic and Protestant asylums of Majella and Bethesda Christian missionaries gave leprosy care a central place in their activities and in the presentation of these activities to their co-religionists and financiers in Europe. Together with the Groot-Chatillon state asylum, Christian asylums were interconnected parts of a system of leprosy care that was created after accommodation between the colonial state and the Christian churches in the 1890s. What resulted was a system including care and medical treatment by colonial medicine that ideally would return cured and grateful citizens back to society. Looking from ‘below’, the asylums were characterised by their own infrapolitics of friction and resentment. The permeability of asylum boundaries characterised by movement of patients between asylums and the outside world, and even between asylums was apparent. In everyday life there were limits to the disciplinary power of the regimes in the asylums.

The First Quarantine: How the Plague Became a Political Disease

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Composite Object ◽  
The Past ◽  
Moral Assessment ◽  
The Government ◽  
Modern Form

The great plague of 1665-1666 is one of the starting points for the birth of biopolitics in its modern form. The quarantine measures introduced by the government have been considered effective from the medical point of view since the middle of the 18th century. However, many of those contemporary with the plague were convinced that the state was only worsening matters for London’s inhabitants. The author examines why the plague elicited such an ambivalent response in England and how the disease stopped being a composite object and turned into a “comfortable, domesticated” concept. The article investigates why the moral assessment of those measures has become so different over the past hundred years and shows how the quarantine in London influenced the “hygienic revolution.” Apart from its historical interest, this case is a suitable topic for the use of STS methodology because it illustrates the impossibility providing a complete description of the quarantine process and subsequent medical treatment in terms of a conflict between different actors. In order to understand why these measures have subsequently been perceived in this fashion, the author applies the concept of Lovecraftian horror, which offers a way to describe the situation of “collisions” with the plague. By describing how biopolitics released the moral tension built up by the co-existence of different interpretations of the causes of the epidemic, the author reconstructs the retrospective creation of the myth about the success of the quarantine. He contrasts the logic of “multiplicity” with the unifying descriptions and shows the kind of problems a “blurred” ontology can bring on during a crisis in everyday life. This leads to a discussion of the difficulty of holding onto unstable objects that have the potential for liberation from the logic of paternalistic care.

Archive

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 591-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Featherstone
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Digital Recording ◽  
Case Histories ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Storage Technologies ◽  
And Storage ◽  
Archive Material

The archive is the place for the storage of documents and records. With the emergence of the modern state, it became the storehouse for the material from which national memories were constructed. Archives also housed the proliferation of files and case histories as populations were subjected to disciplinary power and surveillance. Behind all scholarly research stands the archive. The ultimate plausibility of a piece of research depends on the grounds, the sources, from which the account is extracted and compiled. An expanding and unstable globalizing archive presents particular problems for classifying and legitimating knowledge. Increasingly the boundaries between the archive and everyday life become blurred through digital recording and storage technologies. Not only does the volume of recordable archive material increase dramatically (e.g. the Internet), but the volume of material seen worthy of archiving increases too, as the criteria of what can, or should be, archived expands. Life increasingly becomes lived in the shadow of the archive.

The political role of Christian churches

2020 ◽  
pp. 136-149
Author(s):  
Gregory Deacon
Keyword(s):  
Public Services ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Political ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Political Realm

Christianity has been intimately involved with power in Kenya since the country’s birth even though much has changed with regards to what Christianity is and what it does. Today, as during the colonial and early post-colonial periods, the political role of Christian churches includes the activities of individual clergy and organized churches, both of which make periodic public statements, provide public services, and support local and national governance. However, increasingly important is the central place of neo-Pentecostal ideas, concepts, and imagery in Kenyan society, which pervade the political realm. This chapter outlines the role of Christian churches as organizations. It also analyzes the growth and spread of Christianity as a religion and as a discursive institution as well as associated understandings and practices. Together, this analysis contributes to an understanding of contemporary politics in Kenya, including the place of neo-Pentecostalized Christianity in the 2013 and 2017 elections and Jubilee regime.

scholarly journals Missionale gemeentes in die Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika – Teologies verantwoord

2011 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Christo Van der Merwe
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
Missional Leadership ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Plural Society ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
The Many

Missional congegrations in the Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa – Theologically substantiated The Christian churches are experiencing a major paradigm shift as they attemp to navigate the 20th century. Around the mid-fourth century to the mid-twentieth century CE, often referred to as the ‘age of Christendom’, Christianity and the institutional church had a central place, which was culturally supported in the public life of most Western societies. Today it is impossible to talk about culture without using the plural. Society has changed into what is called a ‘pluriverse’ of cultures determined by aspects such as geography, race, ethinicity, class, and worldview. For Christian denominations, this paradigm shift has become exceedingly challenging. This article discerns and experiments with approaches to ministry that are vitally challenged by the many current understandings of what it means to be church today. By taking the concept missio Dei as point of departure the article describes the church as being called to be a missional church and the Christian leaders as being called to exercise missional leadership. The article addresses the notion of missio trinitatis as fundamental to the understanding of the missio Dei. God is one who lives by sharing, and the Trinity is the doctrine of a God whose very essence is sharing, thus the consequence is that those who believe in such a God must live a similar life. Matthew 28:19−20 serves as basis for a discussion on the ‘embodiment’ of the church’s missional theology as well as a basis for the development of a missional praxis. The fundamental conviction argued in this article is that there can be no place for a future church that is not missional in essence.

MIDWIFERY TRAINING AND FEMALE CIRCUMCISION IN THE INTER-WAR ANGLO-EGYPTIAN SUDAN

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEATHER BELL
Keyword(s):  
Western Medicine ◽  
Female Circumcision ◽  
White Male ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Black African ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
African Patient ◽  
Cultural Exchanges

Although the conventional image of the colonial medical encounter in Africa depicts a white, male, European doctor treating a black African patient, most of the actual deliverers of Western medicine in Africa during the colonial period were non-Europeans. In the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British doctors formed only a small minority of Western medical practitioners. Most often, it was Syrian, Egyptian and Sudanese doctors, and Sudanese assistant medical officers, mosquito men, nurses, sanitary officers and midwives who delivered sanitary and medical services on behalf of the colonial state. Understanding the cultural exchanges, technology transfer and power relations involved in the operation of colonial medicine clearly requires careful study of the training, the role and the experiences of these non-European practitioners of Western medicine.In this paper, one such group of medical practitioners is examined through a study of the Midwifery Training School or MTS, opened in Omdurman, Sudan in 1921. The MTS sought to create a class of modern, trained Sudanese midwives, out of, and in rivalry to, an entrenched class of traditional midwives, known as dayas. The analysis relies heavily on the papers of Mabel E. Wolff, founding matron of the MTS and her sister, Gertrude L. Wolff, who first arrived in Sudan to train nurses. Throughout the discussion, the name ‘Wolff’ alone designates Mabel, whose voice dominates their collective papers.

Policing everyday life: The FIR in the Tamil countryside, c. 1900–50

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-387
Author(s):  
Radha Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Police Station ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Colonial Police

The judicial archive pertaining to the southern districts of Madras Presidency in the first half of the twentieth century indicates that judges, policemen and colonial subjects shared the belief that reports of crime made to the police, the ‘First Information Reports’ or FIRs, were often fabricated, resulting in what was termed a ‘false case’. This article argues that the prevalence of ‘false cases’ does not simply point to a colonial state that was weak in the countryside or whose judicial machinery had gone awry. Rather, the filing of police reports provided a mechanism for villagers to insert the disputes that were part of everyday life into the state’s legal apparatus and to make claims using the language of colonial law. The documentary practices of the colonial state thus shaped local politics, so that registering complaints with the police was an event in rural conflict, not simply the means of resolving conflict that had occurred earlier or elsewhere. Equally, these negotiations for local power through registering cases reaffirmed the authority of the colonial state in everyday practices that emerged around the figure of the policeman and in the space of the colonial police station.

scholarly journals El ganado vacuno en Sumer y Acad

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Delgado Linacero
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Near East ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Poor Diet ◽  
Ancient Society

Cattle were a very important domesticated species in the Near East with goats and sheep. They hoid a special and central place in economy of agro-pastoral ancient society in Mesopotamia, providing good resources of meat, dairy producís, leather and dung, besides labor and draft. However, the highest cost of cattie breeding resulted in a poor diet from these peoples and led to the almost exclusive possession of these animáis by the ruling classes. The valuable and commercial characteristic of cattie was transferred to the religious sphere where its offering and sacrifico became the best gift for the divinity. The sacrificial feasts turned out to be, in many cases, an excellent occasion for the consumption of a special dish which only few people could normally enjoy everyday life.

French Colonial State, Vietnamese Civil Society

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 17-57
Author(s):  
Martina Thucnhi Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
The Self ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Civic Duty ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
French Colonial

In 1937, leading members of the Self-Strength Literary Group [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn], together with a number of Hà Nội’s Western-educated architects and intellectuals, founded the League of Light [Hội Ánh Sáng or Đoàn Ánh Sáng] to combat unsanitary housing. This study traces the league’s brief history, from its inception in December 1936 to its gradual demise sometime in the early 1940s. It argues that the leaders of the League of Light were interested in more than simply improving the living conditions of impoverished Vietnamese; they aspired to carve out a pluralistic public space for civic collective action, where one had barely existed before. For the peasant masses, the league wanted to change how they thought and behaved by manipulating the physical space in which they lived. For educated urban elites, their participation in the organization served to generate modern ideas of community, civic duty, and social responsibility. Through the restructuring and regulation of everyday life, the league’s founders aspired to shape social order through the establishment of a Vietnamese civil society.

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