Native Mind Research Articles

Picturing ethnopsychology: A colonial psychiatrist's struggles to examine Javanese minds, 1910-1925.

This article explores C. F. Engelhard's struggles to construct psychometric devices for the Netherlands Indies between 1910 and 1925. A young Dutch psychiatrist, Engelhard moved to the Netherlands Indies in 1916, where he applied his clinical experience to subject Javanese individuals to mental assessment devices. He imagined that basic picture tests and one's orientation in time provided apt solutions to the cross-cultural challenges facing him. To turn his prototypes into actual tests, Engelhard had to leave his daily work environment and move into the surrounding villages. Aided by local chiefs and his assistant, Soekirman, he managed to set up temporary testing sites, where he examined hundreds of Javanese individuals. Yet despite his attempts to transform Javanese farmers into subjects capable of taking a psychological test, the Javanese remained free to make-or fail to make-meaning out of Engelhard's images. Even though the psychiatrist went to great lengths in taking into account the particular social and cultural features of psychological practice in a colonial context, a vast chasm remained to exist between him and his test takers. This article examines Engelhard's practices against the backdrop of his training as a Western psychiatrist, colonial ideology in the Netherlands Indies, and the reception of his research by other colonial scientists with a wide range of attitudes about "the native mind." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire by Erik Linstrum, and: Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire by Angela Thompsell, and: Beyond the State: The Colonial Medical Service in British Africa ed. by Anna Greenwood

Reviewed by: Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire by Erik Linstrum, and: Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire by Angela Thompsell, and: Beyond the State: The Colonial Medical Service in British Africa ed. by Anna Greenwood Will Jackson Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire. By Erik Linstrum. Harvard University Press, 2016. 320 pp. $39.95 (hardcover). Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire. By Angela Thompsell. Palgrave Macmillan, Britain and the World series, 2015. 229 pp. $100 (hardcover). Beyond the State: The Colonial Medical Service in British Africa. Edited by Anna Greenwood. Manchester University Press, 2016. 208 pp. £70.00 (hardcover). Colonial Knowledge Old and New Writing on colonial knowledge has travelled a long way since the then path-breaking works of Edward Said, Bernard Cohn and Terence [End Page 672] Ranger.1 Where once scholars stressed the reach of colonial knowledge, now they stress its limits. Far from enabling the exercise of power, knowledge gave rise to anxiety and doubt. Never formulated in abstraction, knowledge lived and its lives, social and political no less than intellectual and imaginative, had histories of their own. Knowledge in any case was less a resource than a site of encounter and a frame for situating human (and non-human) relations. It was contested and claimed, borrowed from and denied, parodied and appropriated by subalterns, collaborators and resisters of every kind.2 Of the three books reviewed here, only Linstrum's Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire might be described as world history. All three, however, concern the situating of ideas and ideologies, within networks of experts and institutions and within local communities that both lived with and contributed to forms of knowledge that were at once highly esoteric yet grounded in the everyday. Essentially, these are stories of movement: of the travel of ideas and the diffusion of power. Perhaps the most fitting metaphor for such a situated, mobile knowledge is Linstrum's image of the laboratory in the field. At the end of the nineteenth century, Linstrum explains, a small group of Cambridge-educated medical men began experimental research on the Torres Strait islands between Australia and New Guinea, their objective: a modern, scientific understanding of the psychology of "primitive" peoples. There, these men laid down what would be imperial psychology's enduring and paradoxical motif. On the one hand, the laboratory, with its mechanical precision and its universal standards of measurement; on the other, the field, with its ethnographic ideal that local environments could be understand on their own terms, by human observation, from the inside out. In the Torres Strait, Linstrum argues, the laboratory and the field were not opposed but complementary, blending objectivity and immediacy to create a new kind of research in the human sciences. [End Page 673] To this extent, the laboratory in the field would reveal the parochialism of techniques conceived of in Europe but within epistemic frames that assumed a global appeal. At the same time, the results of these early experiments yielded data that revealed the limits of prevailing colonial common sense. Research showed the emptiness of racial thinking that posited "native" peoples as intellectually inferior compared to Europeans while exhibiting heightened sensory acuity. Comparing results from the Torres Strait with data gathered from control groups in Britain revealed there was no meaningful differences in the ways Europeans and "primitives" perceived their environments. Getting to know the locals in the course of their research reminded the Cambridge men of acquaintances back at home. Personal impressions chimed with quantitative data. Variations within groups were more impressive than comparisons between them. These were revelations not confined to the narrow circles of expert debate. Along with Charles Myers, Alfred Haddon, the expedition's leader, took his findings to the 1911 Universal Races Congress where Myers most vociferously denied the existence of a "native mind." Children in the South Pacific, Myers argued, were mathematically superior to children in an average British school. European peasants were as superstitious as people anywhere. "Savages" were as logically minded as Europeans. Another member of the expedition, W.H.R. Rivers, ran for election to parliament on a radical, anti-colonial...

Psychological symptoms and medical responses in nineteenth-century India.

The article documents medical approaches to mental illness in mid- to late-nineteenth-century India through examining the Indian Medical Gazette and other medical accounts. By the late nineteenth century, psychiatry in Europe moved from discussions around asylum-based care to a nuanced and informed debate about the nature of mental symptoms. This included ideas on phrenology and craniometry, biological and psycho-social causes, physical and drug treatments, many of which travelled to India. Simultaneously, indigenous socio-medical ideas were being debated. From the early to the mid-nineteenth century, not much distinction was made between the Western and the native 'mind', and consequently the diagnosis and investigation of mental symptoms did not differ. However, by the late nineteenth century Western medicine considered the 'Western mind' as more civilized and sophisticated than the 'native mind.

Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds), Psychiatry and Empire, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. ix + 243, £45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4039-4711-6.

This is not the first edited volume to gather historical essays on psychiatry and colonialism. It does, however, contain some very good new research. It also provides some helpful confirmation of observations in previous work. These include, for example, the opinion that colonial psychiatric institutions were more often reluctant and desultory responses to social problems than they were instruments of grand schemes for social control. And, while colonial psychiatrists may have given expert imprimatur to racist theories of ‘the native mind’, they reflected racist ideologies more than they were instrumental in creating them; this theme is not new to this volume, though there are some really remarkable examples in a number of the chapters of how colonial culture compromised the vision of psychiatric theory. A number of the authors also echo previous work in disavowing the utility of applying Foucault by noting, for example, the lack of ‘great confinements’ in colonies, an observation co-editor Megan Vaughan made in her pioneering original work on the subject. There is some significant new ground broken in this volume. Shula Marks contributes a chapter on psychiatric nursing, a topic relatively neglected by historians of psychiatry, and not only in colonies. Marks’s chapter, titled ‘The microphysics of power’, actually illustrates how many of Foucault’s insights about the dynamics of knowledge and power may be relevant to colonial contexts, however much those contexts may differ from those in European metropoles—about which Foucault’s empirical foundation was always shaky, anyway. Richard Keller explores therapeutics in the Maghreb as a laboratory for French psychiatry, exploring the blurry line between therapy and control—themes developed further in his recent monograph. Shruti Kapila provides a nuanced exploration of the reception of Freud in India, showing how psychoanalytic ideas were selectively appropriated, not only as theories of the mind, but as reflections of varied orientations toward both religion and the Indian nation. And Hans Pols’s chapter on psychiatric constructions of the ‘native mind’ in the Dutch East Indies goes further than many previous treatments in exploring how colonised people responded to these ideologies. For readers looking for an overview of the field, Psychiatry and Empire supplants previous edited collections. Taken together, the varied essays provide a good gauge of the state of the field.

Folkbiology: The Importance of How People Understand Nature

Keywords Folkbiology.Folktaxonomy.Folkecology.Biology education.Environment.Anthropology.Cognitive psychologyAlthough this is a long review, I only cover perhaps twothirds of the contents of The Native Mind and the CulturalConstruction of Nature, and very briefly indeed. As thepress release informs us, this book draws on two decades ofresearchandcontainsahugeyieldofdata,analyses,researchprotocols, and theoretical background. Folkbiology is theinterdisciplinary perspective on how people ordinarilyunderstand the biological world (Medin and Atran 1999).In The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction ofNature, we appreciate how far the implications of this fieldcan go. In this overview, I choose a geographical approach:we fly from Guatemala, to Wisconsin, then to the MiddleEast. We then land in university classes and end up inschool classrooms. This tour gives me a minimum basis fora tentative critical summary of the book. In the tour, Iinclude not only findings but also research methods that Ihope will be stimulating for readers of this journal.Guatemala: A “Common Garden Experiment”In a municipality in El Peten, Guatemala, three culturalgroups live mostly by agriculture, hunting, and extractingforest products for sale. What happens when a land, lackingoverall institutional regulation, is shared by three culturalgroups with different histories? Traditional models indecision and game theory predict a “tragedy of thecommons,” i.e. an initial, plausibly cooperative situationsoon subverted by individuals belonging to one of thegroups. These individuals will begin to overexploit com-mon resources, triggering a cascade of people switching tonon-cooperative behaviors. The result will be tragic: therapid depletion of common-pool resources. Remarkably, thesame models predict that common resources will instead bepreserved if—for whatever reason—all individuals of allgroups maintain a resource-saving behavior. But the pointis that saving up or even protecting resources is not at all arational choice when you know that some or many othersare not doing the same (or when you have good reasons tosuspect so). The three groups living in Peten—native Itza’Maya, Spanish-speaking Ladinos, and immigrant Q’eqchi’Maya—seem to defy such theoretical predictions: theyexhibit different patterns of common-pool resources use.Atran, Medin and their group wanted to study thisintercultural scenario, exploring in particular the relationbetween patterns of use of the forest and ways ofunderstanding it. In Chapter 7, “Folkecology and the Spiritof the Commons,” we find an interesting description ofprotocols and results of this research.A series of probes, for example, was used to reveal howpeople understand the forest ecology. Each informant wasshown pictures of local plants and animals and was askedquestions about their relations. For each plant, all animalpictures were laid out and “the informant was asked if anyof the animals ‘search for,’‘go with,’ or ‘are companion of’the target plant, and whether the plant helped or hurt theanimal” (p. 185). The same was done for each animal

Diana Jeater. Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the “Native Mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2007. Social History of Africa series, xxi + 273 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $94.95. Cloth. $38.75. Paper.

Diana Jeater. Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the “Native Mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2007. Social History of Africa series, xxi + 273 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 38.75. Paper. - Volume 52 Issue 2

:Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the “Native Mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930.(Social History of Africa.)

:Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the “Native Mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930.<i>(Social History of Africa.)</i>

Review: The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin

Review: The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature By Scott Atran and Douglas Medin Reviewed by Elery Hamilton-Smith Charles Sturt University, Australia Atran, Scott and Medin, Douglas. The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 333 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-13489-7. RRP$38.00, hardback. The realization that our perception of nature is shaped largely by cultural factors has been slow to develop amongst conservationists and public agencies concerned with land management. Although now well established in the International Union for Conservation of Nature, even many of the formal documents from that organization show that the realization is not fully understood, and not internalized as it might have been. This book reports on a series of empirical studies of conceptualization about environmental phenomena, comparing different indigenous cultural communities in the United States and Central America. It also compares concepts as expressed across generations, and hence provides a picture of change from the very young to adulthood. Findings certainly establish the need to understand culturally based ideas of nature in respect to a specific cultural context, namely, to not rely upon uninformed generalizations. That understanding may well reveal that attempts to educate through standard methods in science education may fail simply because the inherent understandings which children bring to education are overlooked or ignored. A cultural pattern of knowledge organisation may well be in conflict with the knowledge organization which prevails in the classroom. Many land managers will find this a difficult book. It is essentially based in the philosophy of nominalist ontology, namely exploration of the subjective experience which helps people to identify and understand the nature of their thinking and ideas. It thus uses a complex methodology which appears to be somewhat abstract and is often discussed with a complex vocabulary. Those without an established understanding of this genre of research might do well to commence by reading the first chapter, then jumping to the last for an overview of the outcomes which result prior to tackling the detailed body of the text. On the other hand, researchers may find that the book points them towards more effective methodologies and strategies for understanding folk biology and the ways in which cultural perceptions exercise a major control over both thinking and behavior. So, in summary, my personal judgment is that it has served to deepen my own understanding of folk culture, and hence to assist me in developing more effective guidelines for trans-cultural policies. But the book is abstruse to the point where I could not simply use it or extracts from it as recommended reading for the land managers with whom I work. Elery Hamilton-Smith , Professor, Charles Sturt University, Australia. P.O. Box 36, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia. TEL: 613-9489-77850. Electronic Green Journal, Issue 27, Fall 2008, ISSN: 1076-7975

The native mind and the cultural construction of nature

The native mind and the cultural construction of nature

Psychological knowledge in a colonial context: Theories on the nature of the "native mind" in the former Dutch East Indies.

This article analyzes the views of 3 Dutch physicians working in the former Dutch East Indies during the first part of the 20th century. These physicians based ideas about the nature of the normal indigenous psyche on both their analysis of Indonesian individuals suffering from mental illness and on casual observations that represented widely shared cultural stereotypes. On that basis, they advocated a psychological colonial policy, which was to be based on a scientific understanding of the psyche of the Indonesian people. Using these ideas, they advocated political repression, justified inequality and racism, and limited educational opportunities for Indonesians. Representatives of the Indonesian nationalist movement vigorously protested against these ideas.

Role Of MinD-Membrane Association in Min Protein Interactions

Division site placement in Escherichia coli involves interactions of the MinD protein with MinC and MinE and with other MinD molecules to form membrane-associated polymeric structures. In this work, as part of a study of these interactions, we established that heterologous membrane-associated proteins such as MinD can be targeted to the yeast nuclear membrane, dependent only on the presence of a membrane-binding domain and a nuclear targeting sequence. Targeting to the nuclear membrane was equally effective using the intrinsic MinD membrane-targeting domain or the completely unrelated membrane-targeting domain of cytochrome b(5). The chimeric proteins differing in their membrane-targeting sequences were then used to establish the roles of membrane association and specificity of the membrane anchor in MinD interactions, using the yeast two-hybrid system. The chimeric proteins were also used to show that the membrane association of MinD and MinE in E. coli cells had no specificity for the membrane anchor, whereas formation of MinDE polar zones and MinE rings required the presence of the native MinD membrane-targeting sequence.

Islam and the of a Middle East

In her essay, Abul-Fadl argues that the dominant paradigm in the studyof the Middle East is inadequate, a view which leads to her assertion thata shift to a new paradigm is required. She maintains that her study is anattempt to create such an alternative outlook, one which surmounts the contemporaryruling paradigm. She suggests that this new paradigm be basedsolidly on Islam.To begin with, she argues that scholarship on the Middle East must admitthe opinion of a native mind and method of argument to the mediumof discourse, which itself must become more sensitive and more authenticallypluralist if it is to be at all exemplary of historical civilizations and ofworld truth. Without doubt, such a fresh approach will take some time todevelop, for this endeavor requires the rejuvenation of minds and capabilities.As this process begins to take place, Muslims will gradually become moreeloquent and capable of readjusting themselves into identifiable and feasibleflows so that they can build new schools of thought. She writes that the essaytakes the Islamic dimension as a continual factor which goes beyond thetransformation of politics at any given age (p. 2), and that acceptance andawareness of variance and multiplicity in the world of politics can only bebonafide and valuable if it is anchored in fidelity to an encompassing congruitywhich both permeates and surpasses this conglomeration. The encompassingcongruity is tawhid. This paradigm is designed by the tawhidepisteme and assumes at the outset that those modes, foundations, and parlanceare obtained from an Islamic worldview based firmly on the Qur’an and theSunnah .Abul-Fadl reminds her readers that as a designation, the term “MiddleEast” is itself dubious and questionable. She uses it to denote a region whichis more noticeably specified by its culture then by its territory. The concisenucleus of the region is linguistically Arabic and religiously Muslim, as overnine-tenths of its population shares in the principal cultural marks, values,faith, and customary manners of living. However, current Western politicalliterature on the region has stressed divergence and has insisted in viewing ...

Harriette Colenso and the Zulus, 1874–1913

Harriette Emily Colenso, oldest of the five children of the famous Bishop John Colenso of Natal, was born in Norfolk, England, in 1847, and died in Natal at the age of 85, after a life of outstanding activity and purpose. Although the average Natal colonist regarded her as fanatically prejudiced, even the local Natal Witness, the mouthpiece of colonial views, was forced to acknowledge her ‘personal and intellectual qualities’. At the height of her unpopularity in 1907, when she was defending Dinizulu, it wrote:There is probably no person in the colony whose influence on the natives is greater, and there is none who, should she but exert her power in that direction could exercise a more pacifying effect upon the native mind. Miss Colenso is strongly endowed with the judicial faculty and … her grasp of the intricate points of trials and cases in which natives have been involved has often astonished able and experienced lawyers.

Evil and Witchcraft among the Ndogo Group of Tribes

Opening ParagraphIn the native mind evil, and especially any sort of disease as well as death is due either to beings out of a man's reach (spiritual beings) or to human beings endowed with extraordinary power (witches, sorcerers, operators of black magic).There are a few cases in which the natives accept the evidence of facts: perhaps the only one in which almost all of them agree is in the case of murder. Should a man be deliberately killed, suspicions of witchcraft are not entertained. But should he be killed by a wild beast while hunting, inquiries may be made as to the indirect cause of his death. It will be asked: who advised him to go hunting? who brought that bad beast on to his path? who caused the hunter to miss it?

The Evolution of the South African Native Mind

Opening Paragraph‘One must be a native in order to understand the native.’ So we are categorically told by one of our prominent native leaders. Justified race-pride of an awakening people may have prompted that leader to say so, but he can hardly have meant to say that the native mind shall for ever be a sealed book to us. Otherwise we could retort and claim that one must be a European in order to understand the European mind which finds its expression in our culture, and we could quote instances where we see African people trying to do what they believe Europeans do, with but poor or deplorable results.

Principles and Methods of Physical Anthropology

THERE is not an anthropologist in Europe who will not extend a welcome to this work by Rai Bahadur Sarat Chandra Roy, reader in anthropology at Patna University, not only for what it is, but also for what its appearance signifies. Anthropology, hitherto a plant of exotic growth in India, has at length taken root in the native mind. A single readership in a single university is a somewhat slender root for a plant which has to cover more than 300 millions of people, but those who have noted the series of excellent researches and monographs which have been published in recent years by Mr. Roy and by his colleagues and disciples will have no fear of the result if a fostering hand be extended by the Government of India. Our knowledge of the peoples of India has been laid by those great-minded Civil Servants who realised that good government must be based on accurate, intimate, and sympathetic records of the mentality, customs, and traditions of the governed. It was at the feet of one of these great Indian servants, Sir Edward Gait, now chancellor of Patna University, that Mr. Roy was introduced to the methods and aims of modern anthropology. Principles and Methods of Physical Anthropology. By Rai Bahadur Sarat Chandra Roy. (Patna University Readership Lectures, 1920.) Pp. xiii + 181. (Patna: Government Printing Office, 1920.) 5 rupees.

The Bull of the Kraal and the Heavenly Maidens, a Tale of Black Children

MR. KIDD in his earlier works, “The Essential Kafir” and “Savage Childhood,” exhibited an intimate knowledge of the social life of the Bantu race. The present book is more popular, being intended to describe a series of typical incidents in the life of a little boy. Mahleka, the “Bull of the Kraal,” is the son of the Great Wife of the tribal chief, and his heir-apparent. In sketches of this kind, the work of a sympathetic observer of a semi-savage people, there is the risk, on the one hand, of assuming that any foreigner can fathom the deeper recesses of the native mind. On the other, there is the danger of dwelling on their virtues and ignoring the darker side of the native character. Mr. Kidd seems hardly to have avoided both these pitfalls. He sometimes reads into the mind of the Bantu child ideas foreign to it, and his account of the simple life in the kraal neglects the treachery and ruthless ferocity of the Zulu, which it is never safe for the white man to forget.

Bantu Folklore (Medical and General)

THIS is an interesting little work. It will be of value to students of primitive races. It deals chiefly with the ideas of the South African Kafir tribes on the subject of magic, medicine, diseases, and initiation ceremonies. Incidentally it gives a great insight into the extraordinary mixture of superstition, quackery, and practical research in native medicine. The Kafirs are nearly always at fault in their guesses as to the origin of diseases. Some maladies are thought to be caused by the supernatural influence of snakes or of water monsters, half man and half animal, or by the strange bird called impundulu, which by some is thought to be the origin of lightning. Other diseases are attributed to direct poisoning—the word for poison, ubuti, being a very old Bantu root that means the “essence of the tree.” This is a word that in many Bantu languages means medicine quite as much as poison, all the medicines of primitive man having been derived from the bark, sap, fruit, Or leaves of trees. Some of the “snakes” alluded to by the author as the cause of intestinal diseases (in the native mind) are evidently distorted accounts of guinea-worm or tape-worm. Bantu Folklore (Medical and General). By Dr. Matthew L. Hewat. Pp. 112. (Cape Town: T. M. Miller; London: J. and A. Churchill, n.d.)

The Native Question in South Africa 1

IT cannot be too often repeated or too strongly impressed on the public mind of this country that by far the most difficult problem of South Africa is, not that of the relations of the white populations to one another, but that of the relations of the white population to the “Natives,” and of the Natives to one another. It involves questions not to be solved by any process of patching. The ordinary “short view” recommended by European statesmen in treating European problems will not do. To deal with these questions effectually, considerations of a far-reaching economic and anthropological character are necessary. We must understand the Native mind, we must endeavour to see things from the Native point of view, we must consider the Native prejudices and aspirations as well as what we, from our point of view, regard as the Natives' best interests, and we must take into account their physiological and mental condition, and the influence upon it of the changes which have begun and the further changes impending.

The Kingdom of the Yellow Robe: being Sketches of the Domestic and Religious Rites and Ceremonies of the Siamese

THE author has had the advantage of several years' residence in Siam, during which time he learned the language, and his educational duties enabled him to observe the working of the native mind. He writes with an evident sympathy for the common people; and in his sketches of the every-day life of the capital, he has caught not a little of the humour which is one of its chief characteristics. He discourses pleasantly on street and canal scenes, and explains at some length many of the more important ceremonies by means of which Siamese Buddhists make the amount of “merit” necessary for the bettering of their position hereafter, and he gives a short account of the Buddhism of the country. The author makes some interesting observations on education, and gives an attractive picture of the children with whom his duties brought him in contact. He does not go far beyond the capital, and the scattered remarks about the interior do not enlighten the reader much as to the commercial aspects of the country. Politics have also been rigorously excluded. On the whole there is not much which may not be found in Turpin, Crawfurd, Bowring, or Alabaster, or in the recent writings of Captain Oerini. The author does not, however, pretend to an entirely original or exhaustive treatment of the subject. His aim has rather been a chatty and popular account of the life and ideas of the ordinary people, as they present themselves to the observant resident of Bangkok. The Far East is daily coming nearer, and becoming more intelligible, to the Western reader, and the present work is one which, in our opinion, distinctly helps to bridge othe gulf which yet lies between them.