Weaving sound historical research with rich ethnographic insight, An Impossible Inheritance tells the story of the emergence, disavowal, and afterlife of a distinctive project in transcultural psychiatry initiated at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal during the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s clinic remains haunted by its past and Katie Kilroy-Marac brilliantly examines the complex forms of memory work undertaken by its affiliates over a sixty year period. Through stories such as that of the the ghost said to roam the clinic’s halls, the mysterious death of a young doctor sometimes attributed to witchcraft, and the spirit possession ceremonies that may have taken place in Fann’s courtyard, Kilroy-Marac argues that memory work is always an act of the imagination and a moral practice with unexpected temporal, affective, and political dimensions. By exploring how accounts about the Fann Psychiatric Clinic and its past speak to larger narratives of postcolonial and neoliberal transformation, An Impossible Inheritance examines the complex relationship between memory, history, and power within the institution and beyond.
Katie Kilroy-Marac is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
"This creative, sophisticated book is a poignant love song to the attempt to treat madness differently—to the great ambition of Collomb’s hospital in Dakar, and the loss of its initial vision. It reminds us how hard the task is and how much work there is to do." ––T. M. Luhrmann, author, Of Two Minds
"Katie Kilroy-Marac has written a splendidly original and thoroughly researched study of a famous psychiatric clinic in Senegal. The book is an important contribution to the study of the encounter between Western psychiatry and the Global South, and deserves to obtain a wide readership." –– Andrew Scull, author of Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine
288 pp.6 x 9Illus: 6 b/w images
9780520300187$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
May 2019