Premium
Mad Kings, Paper Houses, and an Asylum in Rural Ireland
Author(s) -
SARIS A. JAMIE
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1996.98.3.02a00080
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , colonialism , institution , history , gender studies , sociology , genealogy , ethnology , geography , political science , law , social science , archaeology , politics
This essay examines aspects of the local history and cultural life of St. Columba's Mental Hospital, a formerly large asylum in the west of Ireland. The way local people talk about the hospital as a place and the way the institution mixes its local, colonial, and national histories reveal that native spatial logics have succeeded in at least partially domesticating this bureaucratic structure, even as the asylum and the thinking that motivated it have contributed to historical changes at this periphery.