‘The other’. From savage minds to ethnic identities. (original) (raw)
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Colonialism and Psychology
This paper avers that there is a connection between the construction of psychology and colonialism and that psychology is framed within racism and its constructs of superiority. This is the first of several already published papers.
Celia Brickman, Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind
Psychoanalysis and History, 2020
Celia Brickman's book Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind holds an unresolved tension that weaves in and out of Freud's foundational theory of the human psyche. On the one hand, Freud 'attempted to transcend the racial taxonomies of his time by creating a model of the psyche as held in common by all humans' (p. 9). On the other hand, this universal psyche emerges from an epistemology of modernity that could only posit the psyche along a developmental axis of 'progress,' proceeding from 'primitivity' to civilized. While Freud contended that the 'primitive actually lived on in the structures of contemporary European subjectivity and institutions,' Freud's term 'primitivity,' although affirming 'the universal commonality of the psyche,' was a 'racially indexed term of derogation he used to discredit the pretensions of civilization' (p. 5). Brickman carefully shows us that, no matter how meticulous Freud was to illustrate that 'the universality of the primitive psyche was found in both primitive and civilized people alike,' he inevitably 'pressed into service the available colonialist constructions concerning primitive peoples' (p. 119). In chapter 1, Brickman tracks the appearance and interrelationship between racial terms such as 'primitive,' 'savage,' 'barbarian,' 'heathen,' and 'infidel' within Western Enlightenment thought and colonial anthropology. These terms were gradated within civilizational discourses that undergirded the preeminence of European selfhood in order to justify colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and enslavement. Brickman is concerned with the rise of 'theories of the primitive mind' as 'both sites of European self-fashioning and the fashioning of the other […] in tandem with the development of the modern concept of civilization' (p. 37). She shows how these terms were associated with biological determinism in the works of a series of influential nineteenth-century European philosopherpseudoscientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Hebert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. Paying attention to the work of Bartolemé de Las Casas, she observes how the idea of the 'Noble Savage' establishes the 'primitive'who is always nonwhite-'both outside civilization but also prior to it' (p. 33). By noting the temporal-evolutionary schema of psychoanalysis, Brickman convincingly shows in chapter 2 how Freud squarely rooted psychoanalytic thought in nineteenth-century social-evolutionary thought of 'phylogenetic
A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies, 2017
understanding biology and its tendency to view the human body as pre-programmed by genes that are transmitted from parent to offspring. In this view racialism is pred icated upon a rather inflexible idea of biology, one that underscores the role of inherited traits to denote an individual' s racial identity at birth (Hannaford 1996; Appiah 1990). In such theories, a person' spcial identity-delivered biologically-is an aspect ofhis/her nature that cannot be changed. Such understandings of difference are conditioned by a rather rigid divide-even an opposition-between the concepts of nature and culture. Although cultural differences might serve to express one' s racial or ethnic identity, modern ideologies do not afford culture the power to alter or shape racial identity. In this view culture is "superficial" or "skin deep;' while race, bound to nature, is a permanent marker of difference that pervades the body at a deep level. Attentive to this modern ideology of difference, despite its dubious claim to scientific rigor (Venter 2007; Gould 1996; Fields and Fields 2012), historians have argued that pre-Enlightenment societies have not been bearers of"racial ideologies" in this modern sense (Bartlett 1993; Kidd 2006; Banton 2000). Rather, as they have compellingly argued, earlier eras-Medieval or early modern-have leaned more heavily on accounts of cultural practice to theorize human difference, suggesting that the lines dividing one population from another are more flexible in earlier eras and therefore fundamentally at a remove from modern ideologies. Speaking of the Medieval period, for instance, Robert Bartlett has argued: "To a point, therefore, medieval ethnicity was a social construct rather than a biological datum ... When we study race relations in medieval Europe we are analyzing the contact between various linguistic and cultural groups, not between breeding stocks" {1993, 197). Still more compellingly, Bartlett, quoting Isidore of Seville, a famous schoolmaster of the Middle Ages, observes: "Races arose from different languages, not languages from different races, or, as another Latin author argues, 'language makes race' (gen tem lin g ua Jacit)" (1993, 198). Implicit in this observation is the premise that culture precedes and instates nature in the earlier periods in ways that cease to be possible for modernity. And yet, the view of these historians has been called into question by critics who observe resemblances, connections, and relations between modern and pre-modern forms of race thinking, in large part due to a growing suspicion that "the bifurcation of'culture' and 'nature' in many analyses of race needs to be questioned" and that we need to "query the very boundaries between these categories" (Loomba and Burton 2007, 8, 25.) (For the Medieval period see Heng 2011 and Nirenberg 2007). If that is true of all periods-since nature and culture always "develop in relation to one another" (Loomba and Burton 2007, 8)-it is absolutely crucial for analyzing pre modern cultures. For the noun "culture" that appears in modern vocabularies to describe the endeavors of distinct human populations was never used in the same way in the earlier period, a point whose significance to the study of early modern race cannot be overstated. As Raymond Williams long ago argued, culture was not a thing so much as "a noun of process" in the early modern period, an activity that exerted a shaping force on any aspect of nature-human or otherwise-whether a
Psychoanalysis, Colonialism, Racism
Postcolonial theory has been ambivalent towards psychoanalysis, for good reasons. One of them is the general suspicion of psychological approaches, with their individualistic focus and general history of neglect of sociohistorical concerns. Additionally, there are specific elements of psychoanalysis' conceptual framework that draw upon, and advance, colonialist ideology. Freud's postulation of the "primitive" or "savage" mind, which still infects psychoanalytic thinking, is a prime example here. On the other hand, psychoanalysis' assertion that all human subjects are inhabited by such "primitivity" goes some way to trouble developmental assumptions. In addition, psychoanalysis offers a number of tools that provide leverage on postcolonial issues -most notably, the damage done by colonialist and racist thought. This article presents some of these arguments in greater detail and also examines two specific contributions to postcolonial psychology made by psychoanalysis. These contributions address the "colonizing gaze" and the "racist imaginary."
DECOLMAD Workshop: Psy-Disciplines and Primitivism in Post-colonial Times, 2024
How have psychiatry and primitivist representations interacted with ideologies and nation-state projects in (post)colonial times in different contexts? fined our understanding of the human mind and mental disorders by situating their etiological scale at the genome/ancestry level. These entanglements have impacted at individual and community levels, reshaping perceptions of self, mental disorders, and deviancy, and have provided new languages and frameworks for political identities and biosociality. Despite promoting a new universality based on our shared origins, evolutionary psy-disciplines have reproduced a colonial epistemic domain reorganizing racial order in the so-called post-racial era. For example, some studies have associated specific genotypes with gang membership and weapon use, and other studies claim that children of absent fathers engage in sexual activity-and impulsivity and substance abuse, among others-at an earlier age due to genetic traits inherited from their parents rather than as the influence of environmental aspects.
On Savages and Other Children: The Foundations of Primitive Thought . C. R. Hallpike
American Anthropologist, 1982
Volume 2 of Studies in Cross-Cultural Psychology is another volume primarily for the specialist. It contains eight serious and very competent papers on cognitive styles, perceptual organization, development and socialization in Israel, ecological analyses, everyday concepts of intelligence, achievement motivation, informal modes of learning and teaching in Zinacanteco, and major psychological factors influencing Japanese interpersonal relations. As part of a continuing series, it seems to be precisely what it ought to be and sets a high standard for subsequent volumes. I found the papers on Israel and Zinacanteco to be of particular interest, but the volume as a whole is highly recommended.
The author examines the historical role of Euro-American psychology in constructing Orientalist representations of the natives who were colonized by the European colonial powers. In particular, the author demonstrates how the power to represent the non-Western “Other” has always resided, and still continues to reside, primarily with psychologists working in Europe and America. It is argued that the theoretical frameworks that are used to represent non-Westerners in contemporary times continue to emerge from Euro-American psychology. Finally, the author discusses how non-Western psychologists internalized these Orientalist images and how such a move has led to a virtual abandonment of pursuing “native” forms of indigenous psychologies in Third World psychology departments.