The Fabric of Care in 20th Century European and North African Psychiatric Asylums

This dissertation examines how colonial force and political circumstance informed the material cultures of institutional care and contested spaces of everyday life in France and colonial North Africa between 1895 and 1962, during the decades associated with the rise of institutional, transcultural, and social psychiatry, and with national independence and deinstitutionalization movements. It focuses primarily on practices and events in and around several psychiatric institutions in France and Algeria, and secondarily in Italy and Libya, analyzing films, photographs, doctors’ accounts, objects, and secondary historical sources to better understand the place of material culture practices, and specifically practices with “soft” materials such as textiles, in the infrastructure of care. This dissertation argues that “soft” things such as sheets and tents are worthy of study in their roles in the negotiation of care as a form of social power in everyday life, evident in practices and processes ranging from disease treatment and transmission to the design of forms of shelter and the introduction of creative activities as a form of psychiatric therapy and emotional sustenance. Beyond presenting a history of material culture in institutional psychotherapy and introducing an aesthetic approach to the study of asylum objects such as garments and linens, this dissertation connects everyday materials to the transformation of social and cultural meaning. It proposes that we regard soft material forms as redemptive surfaces through which to study shifting relationships of power between the brutality and benevolence of institutional governance and across the creative practices and survival strategies of workers and institutionalized subjects during the period leading up to national independence in North Africa and the deinstitutionalization movement in European psychiatry. I address the scarcity of visual representations of institutional life as in itself a source of historical knowledge, analyzing the images and texts that remain as sources of knowledge about multisensory engagement with material forms of practice, interpretable phenomena that shed light on relationships of care and power inside the walls of asylums with respect to gender, race, agency, and subjectivity. A contribution to art historical material culture studies, this dissertation also seeks to contribute to the history of psychiatry some methodological approaches to understanding the role of soft things in the negotiation of history and culture, and the utility of studying visual artifacts and their remnants and representations to better understand the interaction and experience of institutionalized people and workers with the medical authorities who authored the documentation that constitutes most of what remains in the archives.

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