Dossier : Droit et folie en situation coloniale. Perspectives impériales comparées (XIXe-XXe siècle)
Écrire l’histoire juridique de la folie en situation coloniale (Silvia Falconieri)
Presentation of the issue
The article gives an account of the methodological discussions that were carried out within the framework of the AMIAF research project, the purpose of which was to identify sources permitting the writing of a legal history of madness in the context of French colonization. The article thus starts by taking a look at the sources undergoing scrutiny, in particular those kept by the colonial archives. The paper then moves on to discuss the implementation of tools which facilitate both the access to and the use of documentary collections by the scientific community, or by anybody interested in the subject, by providing feedback on the construction of the AMIAF digital library.
The aim of this article is to compare the regulation regarding asylums between British and French colonies, to study their management in a peculiar colonial context and to highlight the differences between the two colonial empires. The texts might sometimes differ in content, but the regulations are alike in their evolution throughout the period, with a will to improve the legal treatment of lunatics, but not without taking higher economic interests into account, while enduring colonial constraints.
Law and medicine have known a specific development, in Egypt, at the beginning of the 19th century. The different Egyptian courts dealt with cases that implied a psychiatric dimension in both penal and civil proceedings. Through the journal al-Muhâmâ, it is aimed to give an account of the multiple intersections of knowledge and categories, their location in the contemporary Egyptian legal and judicial dynamic, and the mutations that they imply in the understanding of both law and the human psyche, at a pivotal historical moment for Egypt.
Based on an examination of the archives of the colonial authorities in French Algeria, this article aims to examine the role of the administration throughout the legal process of confinement in specialized facilities between 1933 and 1962. From the analysis of its workings, its contradictions and its relationship with the “public”, one can piece together the profile of a conscientious administration faced with various structural challenges (Overcrowded facilities, financial problems, internal quarrels or disputes with other institutional actors) which constantly required a spirit of innovation and resourcefulness. These same issues were to be found in the field of human challenges where the administration had to deal with cases of legal pluralism, discrimination and ill-treatment. From a broader perspective, based on the study of the legal and administrative management of mental illness in the context of French colonization, the article seeks to envisage the possibility of identifying the existence of an administrative system in Algeria.
This article looks at individual cases of "dangerous lunatics" in the colony of Senegal to shed new light on the legal and logistical shortcomings of the care of the insane in the territory. The management of "dangerous lunatics" is above all a matter of police and repressive management of madness, resulting in the confinement of lunatics in a multitude of often non-medical places scattered throughout the country. Rather than thinking about the treatment of individuals, the analysis of these files reveals the permanent negotiation between various authorities of the colony. They wish above all to relieve themselves of the responsibility of receiving a "dangerous madman" and the possible danger that it may pose.
This article analyses the developments of psychiatry in the Italian overseas territories in the first half of the 20th century. After an analysis of the attributes characterizing this branch of the discipline (colonial, ethnographic, comparative, racial), it describes the mental health facilities deployed in Libya : the transfer of patients to asylums in Italy first and later the opening of specific structures in situ, between penitentiary and mental prophylaxis aims. The theories developed on the “indigenous mind” and its pathological deviations are also examined, as well as the practices that linked caregivers, patients, and families.
Traductions : Droit, géographie et technique
Since the 1980 s, critical studies of law and space have fruitfully explored the insight that law’s mechanisms can be understood in part as mapping exercises. Existing work on law’s scales (especially that using a post-colonial studies frame) has delved into the qualitative as well as the quantitative dimensions of scale, thus exposing some key epistemological issues in law. This article moves the discussion forward by demonstrating that theoretical work on ‘scale’ – outside and inside legal studies – could benefit from studying specifically legal mechanisms such as ‘jurisdiction’. Recent work has shown that the various modes and rationalities of governance that coexist in every political-legal ‘interlegality’ are not necessarily tethered to any scale ; thus, exploring jurisdiction’s effects takes us beyond scale. As an example, the knowledge moves that constitute what in the USA is called ‘the police power of the state’ are briefly discussed. The fact that the gaze of police science/police regulation is not simply geographically local, but is rather specifically urban, shows the importance of understanding the complex governing manœuvres enabled by the legal game of jurisdiction – especially if work on ‘scale’ and jurisdiction is then supplemented by a consideration of the plural temporalities of governance, since temporality tends to become invisible both in analyses that privilege space and in the somewhat static diagrams of governance that make up the game of jurisdiction.
This paper documents court-imposed bail and sentencing conditions with spatial dimensions, such as red zones, no contact conditions, curfews, and prohibitions to demonstrate, issued in the context of criminal proceedings. These conditional orders, which are growing in importance and have a significant impact on the lives of marginalized people, have not received the attention they deserve in the literature. As opposed to better publicized forms of spatial regulation such as legislation or policing strategies, these conditional orders are a distinctive form of spatial tactic that rely on ancient and routinized rules of criminal procedure and the practices of the courts. In order to understand this spatial tactic, as well as its impact on marginalized people’s rights and uses of spaces, we argue that it is necessary to pay attention to the legal rationalities and practices that sustain it.
After explaining how the two translated texts articulate law and geography, this article emphasizes that they take "legal technicalities" seriously. After reviewing the invisibility of legal knowledge and techniques in many social science studies, the article argues, as do these two texts, that research should focus more systematically on legal activity and knowledge. The study of the practical organization of the work of legal actors, their reasoning, their use of categories and concepts in context, lay the foundations for a social science of law. By focusing on this "work of law", on law as a real and empirically observable performance, as a concrete and situated activity, the dialogue between jurists and social sciences could be effectively and durably renewed.
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