African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return
African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return
by Nana Osei Quarshie
University of Chicago Press, 2025
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-226-83916-5
Paper: 978-0-226-83918-9
eISBN: 978-0-226-83917-2 (all)
About the Book
Explores how psychiatry in Ghana was never just about medicine; it was about migration, exile, and the politics of who gets to stay and who must be cast out.
For centuries, mental distress in West Africa has been subject to a mix of healing, harming, ritual, and regulation. In African Pharmakon, Nana Osei Quarshie questions conventional narratives about colonial psychiatry. Instead of displacing African therapeutic traditions, he argues, European psychiatric institutions in fact built upon them, adapting long-standing techniques of social control and healing.
With a focus on Ghana, Quarshie explores the shifting landscape of West African mental health practices, tracking their transformation from shrine-based rituals to colonial asylums and modern psychiatric institutions. Combining extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, including the first scholarly examination of patient records from the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Quarshie identifies five enduring techniques that have shaped the treatment of mental distress: spiritual pawning, logging, manhunting, mass expulsion, and pharmacotherapy.
Rejecting the simplistic opposition of Indigenous healing versus colonial oppression, African Pharmakon provides a nuanced account of how psychiatric care in Ghana became a tool of empowerment as well as exclusion. This pioneering study reframes our understanding of psychiatry and mental health governance in West Africa, past and present.
For centuries, mental distress in West Africa has been subject to a mix of healing, harming, ritual, and regulation. In African Pharmakon, Nana Osei Quarshie questions conventional narratives about colonial psychiatry. Instead of displacing African therapeutic traditions, he argues, European psychiatric institutions in fact built upon them, adapting long-standing techniques of social control and healing.
With a focus on Ghana, Quarshie explores the shifting landscape of West African mental health practices, tracking their transformation from shrine-based rituals to colonial asylums and modern psychiatric institutions. Combining extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, including the first scholarly examination of patient records from the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Quarshie identifies five enduring techniques that have shaped the treatment of mental distress: spiritual pawning, logging, manhunting, mass expulsion, and pharmacotherapy.
Rejecting the simplistic opposition of Indigenous healing versus colonial oppression, African Pharmakon provides a nuanced account of how psychiatric care in Ghana became a tool of empowerment as well as exclusion. This pioneering study reframes our understanding of psychiatry and mental health governance in West Africa, past and present.
About the Author
Nana Osei Quarshie is assistant professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, with affiliations in the Departments of Anthropology and Religious Studies and the Yale School of Medicine.
Reviews
“African Pharmakon offers a deep and powerful rethinking of West African mental health from the birth of the Black Atlantic to the present. Quarshie’s novel analytic, the mind politic, is an absolutely precious gift.”
— Julie Livingston, New York University“In this compelling and historically rich account, Quarshie shows how the West African ‘pharmakon’ became entangled with—or even codified into—colonial and postcolonial law, migration policy, and psychiatric care.”
— Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin–Madison“With African Pharmakon, Quarshie greatly expands the field of the history of madness. He makes it diasporic, he crosses historical time periods, and he calls us to fundamentally rethink histories of confinement and capture in new and exciting ways.”
— Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, University of Texas at Austin
Tags
Ghana, Mental illness, Asylum, Shrine, Slavery, West, Africa, Medical, Political aspects, Cultural & Social, Social aspects, Anthropology, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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