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21A.460J – Medicine, Religion, and Politics in Africa and the African Diaspora Lecture 9 3 March, 2005 Social life of students at MIT; racial segregation at MIT Erica James: How is it that particular ideas of the body were created through institutional practices? To what extent is there conscious design? Does the representation occur before segregation? Are they prior to or after the interventions on people’s bodies? At the policy level are they intended for/or the result of psychological tools? Practices Æ representations or Representations Æ practices? Chicken-egg. -- Foucault—public health, clinical world, institution of hospital as site of power. Lock and Scheper-Hughes piece theorized the body in 3 ways, body on the symbolic level vs. body on the institutional level. Idea of fetish, relevant, and the idea that particular object is imbued with power and magic—became to represent the black mind, b/c of fixation, incapable of generalization, self-governance—and how that is elaborated over time. -- Fabian—intervention of explorers into central Africa, holding onto ideas of hygiene and occurring at point of colonial expansion/race for Africa. Reminiscent of Foucault: The designation of particular populations of in need of guidance, control, domination that was rationalized by looking at Africans as lesser, separate species, lower on the hierarchy or civilization, development, sexuality, the body as aberrant (recall the Hottentot Venus and her reproductive anatomy) -- these GAZES (Foucault) are being employed to rationalize or justify particular interventions imperialistic and bodily interventions. -- Butchart starts with Renaissance period, stereotypes of otherness, how they reinforce practices of African body as site of disease. Role of medicine as a part of the “Mission”, as part of a political mission, and the difference is substantiated in spatial segregation. Take a look at conclusion as well. How Apartheid segregation was justified. We’re at the end of the European perspective on the African body. We’re tracing how production of different forms of knowledge and the project of science in establishing difference and pathology. Ethnographies told from African side saw strategies to understand different cultural experiences. Question scientific method and methodologies. When a group/nation is in position of power to subjugate others, they are also creating knowledge, or engaging in knowledge production about the Other. -- Anthropologists—tools of “ethnography” were rooted originally in colonialist endeavors and early ideas of natural science. —Medicine: note also how it constructs its objects. There was no ‘African body’ before biomedical intervention into the body: medical missionaries focused particularly upon the body in this colonial area. Want to emphasize and review Foucault. Also, Frantz Fanon—interesting but will take us in a different direction. African body and mentality, -- activists writing in the postcolonial genre emphasize how colonialism also colonized the minds of Africans as well. Background: Butchart. Sociology of power, African medicine. WHO. Violence prevention team. Former professor in psychology in South Africa. 121A.460J – Medicine, Religion, and Politics in Africa and the African Diaspora Lecture 9 3 March, 2005 Chapter 1: The African Body in History and Histories of the African Body Looking at body itself and how other people have written histories of colonial Africa and how these histories have focused on the body as a passive receiver. Butchart wants to see it as more active—and subject. Generalizes 3 views of history of medicine in Africa. - medicine as achievement, the oldest view of doctors to “civilize and bringing light” - Medicine as functional response, histories - Medicine as repression: focus on Africans. (quote on page 5). Not only as its effect but with doctors as directly involved in this repression, seeing themselves as instruments of power - Historical context: colonial persuasion - Personal approach to history—genealogical method. History is complicated where not all things related to each other in a cause-and-effect. Dissent. - Geneological—kinship focus of anthropology. Tracing power through time through generations. Foucault’s method is “archaeology”, “genealogy.” Looking at events, not as natural progression that came before but tries to unpack certain events. Figure of leper, asylum, the institution of the clinic, the prison—not exactly “okay this year, but okay this year”. A tracing of power, networks – Butchart’s text is Foucauldian in that sense. Not giving history of South Africa, but giving a trajectory through time, looking at kinship—genealogy—prime founders or leaders, the inheritance of power. Rather than a chronological series of events, unpacking some more than others Board: FOUCAULT Sovereign Ruler with power over life and death Visible spectacles with functionaries, at a fundamental level. All these forms of power can exist simultaneously. Leper Mad Plague Discipline Quarantine Power applied on local, diffuse way Type of knowledge production=power Schools, army, family, prison, religion – institutions, applications of power, order, shaping the subjectivity—the consciousness of individuals (not identity/individuality)—regimentation, hierarchy of power, definite means of punishment. - In applying power, one is creating it. Butchart’s example: the act of giving a test, examining their body, these interventions that the doctors make, public health management—create particular forms of knowledge about that - Butchart: there was no African body until medicine created identified addressed it as an object of knowledge, intervention, POWER. - Prison—the diagram of power, there were various philosophers, the most optimal way to survey a population of prisoners with least number of officers but greatest effect. 221A.460J – Medicine, Religion, and Politics in Africa and the African Diaspora Lecture 9 3 March, 2005 PANOPTICON prisoner prisoner prisoner POWER prisoner prisoner - shift of external power, visible to internalized power, diffuse—governmentality, panopticon and don’t know where big brother is (not like martial law in countries) - These practices of state, functionaries, to tabulating information about population, politics of health in 18th century, the development of medicine as a


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MIT 21A 460J - Lecture Notes

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