Madness and the Material Environment: An Archaeology of Reform in and of the Asylum
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Madness and the Material Environment: An Archaeology of Reform in and of the Asylum Peta Longhurst 1
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017
Abstract Mental asylums of the nineteenth century were intended to be reformative in a number of senses – reformative of society, of the insane themselves, and of the institutions to which they were confined. This paper draws on four institutions from New South Wales, Australia, to consider the tensions between reformist ideals and material realities. These tensions are not particular to nineteenth - century asylums but persist in their modern forms. An archaeological understanding of mental institutions in the past can therefore inform, and reform, our understanding of institutions in the present, interwoven with the material and ideological residue of the original asylums. Keywords Reform . Asylums . Institutions . Australia
Introduction Lunatic asylums are often remembered as sites of maltreatment and neglect, as punitive institutions that evoke feelings of horror, fear, and revulsion. And yet the designation of these institutions as asylums was originally intended to denote them as places of refuge and shelter for those confined there (Reaume 2002: 408). The asylums of the nineteenth century were conceived as places of reformation. This reform can be understood in a number of senses; as reform of the behavior of the insane themselves, as reform of the communities from which the insane and their perceived deviance had been removed, as reform of the ways in which society responded to insanity, and as reform of the alternate institutional forms that had preceded them (Piddock 2007: 44–47; Spencer-Wood and Baugher 2001: 4).
* Peta Longhurst [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney, SydneyQuadrangle A14NSW 2006, Australia
Int J Histor Archaeol
Why then did institutions driven by principles of humanitarianism come to record such dark histories? What were the materialities at the core of this disjunction between positive intentions and negative remembrances? Historical interpretations of asylums have tended to portray the institutions as reflections and physical manifestations of psychiatric theory and ideology. But to what extent were these ideologies actually realized at asylum sites, and what consequences did this have for the ways in which the institutions operated? Through an archaeological analysis of a number of nineteenth century asylum sites, this paper interrogates the institutional realities that accompanied reformist ideals, and draws out the tensions between them. This paper is concerned with the ways in which reform in all its senses was made material at institutional sites within a colonial context. The buildings, landscapes, and material culture that constituted mental institutions were not neutral spaces within which psychiatric theories could be enacted, but rather were highly ideological places whose construction was informed by both medical and social perspectives on insanity (P
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