The Material and Symbolic Production of Insanity at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1813-1900

Summary

The Royal Edinburgh Asylum was one of the leading institutions in psychiatric research and treatment in 19th-century Scotland and one of the first to institute programs of moral management. While derived from French and English models, the implementation of moral management followed a distinct trajectory at the REA and other Scottish asylums, reflecting their particular cultural and political context. My paper will examine how the material practices of 19th-century institutions emerged from contingent historical processes — in particular, the rise of global capitalism and correspondent transformations in the conceptualization and performance of intersectional identities — and how these contingencies gave rise to our particularly "modern" views of class, gender, and mental illness. Archaeology holds enormous potential to broaden and possibly challenge our understanding of inmates’ daily lives, as well as to indicate how these experiences on the margins of society were fundamentally entangled with broader cultural discourses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2017   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 240