African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return

Join us for an engaging seminar featuring Professor Nana Osei Quarshie of Yale University, presenting “African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return.”

👤 About the Speaker
Nana Osei Quarshie is an Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University and is also affiliated with Yale’s Department of Anthropology and School of Medicine. He is the author of the award-winning book African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return.

✨Abstract:

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.

✨ If you’re interested in African Studies, history of medicine, anthropology, psychiatry, colonialism, or global health, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Free Admission; We warmly welcome everyone to attend!

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