Abstract:

Ways of mapping mental illness in the world involve stories about history, time and qualities of knowledge. This paper explores the history of hysteria as a South Asian story. With a South Asia-centred history of the contemporary critical concept of cultural translation, this paper observes not only hysteria’s long South Asian history, but the colonial emergence of a definingnarrative—the equation of hysteria to spirit possession, a naturalised conceptual arrangement that superimposed upon along history of medical encounters racialised ideas about epistemological difference.

About the Speaker:

Professor Sarah Pinto is the Chair of the Anthropology Department at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and is interested in histories and cultures of medicine, especially as they pertain to gender, kinship, caste, law, and everyday intimacies, with a regional focus on South Asia. She is also interested in the ways knowledge about bodies and minds moves across time and place, and how, in such movements, colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial scientific imaginations seed critical genealogies, often counterintuitively. In the diverse ways people make use of medicine and science, she is drawn to the forms of creativity, imagination, and ethical world-making that emerge in the interstices of authority and power. Her research has considered childbirth, infant mortality, and birth-work in Uttar Pradesh, India, noting the way reproductive health interventions reiterate caste and the marginalization of Dalit women; women's movement through psychiatric care settings in urban north India and the intersections of kinship dissolutions with crisis and care; and histories of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in South Asia as they pertain to women's lives and gendered diagnoses, notably "hysteria" and its avatars. She is the author of three books: Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (Berghahn 2008), Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (University of Pennsylvania Press 2014), and The Doctor and Mrs. A: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis (Women Unlimited 2019, Fordham University Press 2020). She is currently writing a book about the history of hysteria in India and conducting research on end-of-life medicine in West Bengal.