The Histories of Health, Science, and the Environment in the Global South Workshop presents:
A Conversation with Dr. Sarah Pinto (Tufts) on,
“Minds Under Influence: Revisiting Pathologies of the Will in Late Colonial India"
Date: Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: Fayerweather Hall, Room 513
Lunch will be provided at the workshop
Co-sponsored by the South Asia Institute
In late colonial psychiatry in India and other settings, concepts of influence wove through medical and legal processes, articulating sciences of the mind with criminal law, counter-insurgency, and the policing of sexuality. This project traces concepts of the will and its lassitude as it shaped a conversation about illness, masculinity, and culpability, offering lingering metaphors for postcolonial neurology.
Dr. Sarah Pinto is Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Tufts University. Prof. Pinto is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on histories and cultures of medicine, as they pertain to gender, kinship, caste, law, and everyday intimacies, with a regional focus on South Asia. 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.
About the Workshop: The workshop is supported by the Center for Science and Society and the Global History of Science Cluster, and aims to bring together a community of students and faculty interested in classic and cutting-edge studies in the social history of medicine.
More specifically, this workshop series focuses on: the social and cultural histories of medicine and science; relationships between climate and health histories; the politics of knowledge about health and care; and histories of labor, capitalism, and development that are tied to chronic exposures and endemic risks in the global South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on the periods of decolonization and postcolonial state building. The series was organized with an interest in deepening interdisciplinary approaches, and in thinking about intersecting and linked transregional studies and historical movements. The meetings will offer a space for debate and exchange to help students and faculty refine their ideas and writing; and to develop intellectual tools that aim to address questions relating to medicine, health and society historically, and also to address contemporary questions.
