The Hidden Patients: North African Women in French Colonial Psychiatry, 1883–1962 by Nina Salouâ Studer

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 75 Balaguer, 1105. Cruïlla de civilitzacions, Lleida, 2007, pp. 99–120). A. Fromherz’s identification of the location of Ibn Tumart’s birthplace has been proven wrong and superseded by the research carried out by a FrenchMoroccan team, first in an article published in Al-Qantara 27 (2006), pp. 153– 194 and then in many other publications such as A.S. Ettahiri, A. Fili and J.-P. van Staevel, «La montagne d’Igiliz et le pays des Arghen (Maroc). Enquête archéologique sur une société de montagne, de la révolution almohade à la constitution des terrois précoloniaux», Les Nouvelles de l’archéologie 124 (2011), pp. 49–53. Almoravid women certainly deserve the attention paid in this book (p. 159) and in this respect now we have the study by Manuela Marín, ‘The Princess and the Palace: On Hawwa’ bint Tashufin and Other Women from the Almoravid Royal Family’ (in Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernández (eds.), In and Off the Mediterranean. Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2015, pp. 29– 47). The Kitab al-istibsar, which was considered to be anonymous (p. 177), may have an author as proposed by Muhammad b. Sharifa (fiIbn fiAbd Rabbihi al-hafid hal huwa mu√allif Kitab al-istibsar√, al-Akadimiya 7 (1441/1990), pp. 75–106). That Ibn Qasi was a Sufi (pp. 245, 274) has recently been challenged by Michael Ebstein (Studia Islamica 11 (2015), pp. 196–232). To read a book that deserves to be read means entering into a conversation with it. The points I have just made are the result of having engaged in such a conversation because what Amira Bennison has offered us is an excellent, illuminating and enjoyable piece of scholarship to read. MARIBEL FIERRO CSIC-Madrid NINA SALOUÂ STUDER, THE HIDDEN PATIENTS: NORTH AFRICAN WOMEN IN FRENCH COLONIAL PSYCHIATRY, 1883-1962. KÖLNWEIMAR -WIEN, BÖHLAU VERLAG, 2016. The books aims to explore, map and interpret the absence of female North African patients both in French psychiatric institutions in the Maghreb and in the texts written by physicians and psychiatrists working in that context. The author’s point of departure is the statement of the absence of mentally ill women patients both in the scientific literature produced in the period 18831962 , that is from the first dissertation on insane North African patients to the independence of Algeria, and in the most recent historical analysis of what has been called ‘colonial madness’ in the French Maghreb, a flourishing field of study at the intersection of colonial and postcolonial histories and histories of the psychiatric discipline and mental health. Studer adds an important perspective to complete the picture, which has remained somewhat unfinished, of colonial madness in this geographical framework, that of gender, which 76 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS enables her to shed new light both on colonial psychiatric spaces and practices, and on the process (strategies, dynamics, results, blind spots) of building knowledge of colonial insanity. Owing to female population invisibility, its inaccessibility, and the impossibility of (colonial) expert intervention on it – all reasons for which, reading the texts along the grain, Studer finds doctors’ selfabsolutory elucidations and the parallel judgements on the indigenous society – savants, physicians, and psychiatrists more particularly left more or less consciously unexplored a good half of the population. Whilst not proceeding chronologically but thematically, this historical analysis nevertheless enables Studer to observe some notable transformations in the forms of care and treatment and in the ways in which North African patients’ madness has been thematized and explained. While initially (and for many decades in the Algerian case), indigenous and French patients were shipped to the asylums of Southern France (Marseille etc.) without the possibility of a true prise en charge owing to the absence of treatments, with the opening of psychiatric hospitals in the Maghreb by French authorities and the internment of patients there in the 1930s, innovative and experimental treatments were used (and perhaps abused). A relative evolution can also be seen in the explanations given in colonial psychiatric sources for women’s alienation, for the relative absence of women in French institutions, for the...