This equivocal dust: a review of Material Cultures of Psychiatry, edited by M Ankele and B Majerus.

Abstract

Topics such as the criteria for diagnosing mental illness, the institutional arrangements for treating the mentally ill, or the exclusion related to having been consigned to a mental institution are not so much topics of the past, as topics with a past. One is aware that invoking that past has become to some extent ritualistic, but this does not make having that past in view any less important, or any less fraught with impasses. The history of psychiatry, at least when conceived as histoire d’en bas, has already reconstructed numerous portraits of individuals, recovering traces of real lives from the ruins of classification systems and institutional metabolism. In painting portraits, artists used to subtly place objects that reflected the biography or ambitions of the subject, but it is only more recently that objects that were part of the everyday life of institutionalized individuals became themselves part of the narratives offered by historians and other scholars of psychiatry. Excavating these remains – and finding ways to listen to them – is part of telling a fuller story of the people who lived for many years in mental institutions, and indirectly of madness as both part of medical science, and a figment of our culture. In the spring of 2018, the conference Material Cultures of Psychiatry was set to explore precisely such barely habitable spaces of what-remains, with a mix of scholarly, pedagogical and artistic contributions. Three years later, a selection of those contributions was published in a book, edited by Monika Ankele and Benoît Majerus (2021).1 It is a rich collection, which could be of particular interest to those scholars who usually only read English, since it makes available research done in other European languages (mostly German and French). The book is divided in to five parts, the last of which is dedicated to pedagogical/artistic projects. Interspersed in the other parts are more instances of art. As none of the works are purely