Either marked by certain dates, framed as the transfer of power, or signalled by political ceremony, 20th century decolonization has traditionally been understood as the inauguration of postcolonial national sovereignty. However, apart from its diplomatic component, decolonization also represented a world defining historical moment and process to articulate new postcolonial futures centred around alternate ways of knowing and imagining notions of subjectivity, community, and culture. Seemingly detached and neutral realms like the “sciences” were not devoid of the changes wrought by decolonization but fundamentally imbricated and shaped by it. As MISCHA SUTER (Geneva) in his opening remarks put it, the point of departure for the conference was that “decolonization constituted just as much an epistemological challenge as it was a geopolitical process.” Looking at how the human sciences grappled with the questions this challenge posed in turn also illuminates what decolonization meant to different actors and how it materialized in concrete contexts.

Evoking the parable of the blind men and the elephant, HELEN TILLEY (Evanston) in her keynote emphasized the political stakes, dangers, and potentials in writing the history of science. As she explained it, if truth is many-faced, if different ways of knowing are valuable and can co-exist, and if historical research can “only ever yield partial truths,” then the crucial questions are how can the countless iterations of the knowledge/science divide be retraced, how can the pitfalls of categorizing, reifying and policing be avoided, and how can the discipline more honestly address “its blind spots?” Engaging heuristics such as the ways in which spaces were conjectured, social categories (re)defined, sciences configured, different subjectivities registered, and questions of universality and particularity grappled with – to take up the titles of the conference’s panels –, the contributors sought to collectively interrogate how decolonization shaped conceptions of the human and the human sciences. Proceeding thematically, this report outlines three sets of points concerning method, concepts, and agency that emerged across the panels, presentations, and discussions held at the conference.

Firstly, evoking a diverse array of source material, the contributions collectively point towards the different expressions, genres, and sites through which the human sciences and decolonization can be studied. POKUAA ODURO-BONSRAH (Geneva) showed how photographs of Ugandan infants taken by Western, psychologically inclined scientists set norms for “good” parenting in Uganda following the end of World War II. By subjecting the daily lives of parents and children to scrutiny, these images provided important benchmarks against which the child-rearing practices of future Ugandan citizens were located within the intimate sphere of the family. In a similar vein SLOAN MAHONE (Oxford) showed the photographs that British psychiatrist Edward L. Margetts took of his interlocutors in Kenya to their descendants. Their reactions allowed her to paint a much more complex picture of what happened in 1950s decolonizing Kenya, complicating the historiography of colonial psychiatry so “overblown” with British ethnopsychiatrist and clinic director J.C. Carothers and the Mau Mau uprising. NANA OSEI QUARSHIE (New Haven) used the psychiatric ward to move away from state archives and tell the history of the Gold Coast’s political economy. He showed how the idea of the lunatic got conflated with migrant labourers in search of employment in the crop economy. Quarshie expanded this story temporally into the precolonial, Atlantic period, questioning the thesis that European psychiatry constituted a big epistemic rupture. On a planetary scale, CAROLYN BILTOFT (Geneva) argued that one can trace global intellectual conjunctures through three dimensions of projection: maps (geography, astronomy), self (neuroscience) and visual/lens (cinematic, media). In the historical conjuncture posed by decolonization, Biltoft observed a renewed intellectual ferment with regards to humanity’s relationship to the universe: while technology has enabled humans to step foot on the moon, people increasingly have sought to return to the organic.

Turning to more literary sources, both LEIGHAN RENAUD (Bristol) and RICHARD PHILLIPS (Sheffield) used literature – and the stories that its genres enable – to both challenge ethnocentric portrayals but also for constructing alternate stories about the self and society. Renaud suggested that the representation of the Caribbean family in the Jamaican activist and sociologist Erna Brodber’s writing as a “fractal” – a pattern that repeats itself with a slight difference in each iteration – is more meaningful than the hierarchical diagram of a family tree. Philipps in turn reflected on the emancipatory potential of children’s stories in providing a space to dream and hope for different worlds.

Parallel to such archival excursions, a second theme concerned the different modes through which contributors sought to destabilize and decentre seemingly stable conceptualizations surrounding questions of space, subjectivity, and culture. IAN MERKEL (Groningen) proposed the concept of the semi-periphery as a category to better describe certain places – at once urban and rural, dominated and dominating – in the “global knowledge economy.” In his research on the social sciences in Brazil and their connections to France, Merkel realized that the model of extractions from periphery to metropole did not adequately account for how knowledge is produced. Similarly, ALLISON SANDERS (Paris) argued that ambiguous grey areas between colonial and postcolonial conditions enabled major shifts in French social sciences and proved generative for a generation of mostly French scholars. French research institutions in Africa, concrete grey areas, provided the freedom to experiment far from the controlling metropole, while overarching frameworks such as Marxism constituted abstract grey areas with a universalist tendency. DAMIANO MATASCI (Geneva) in turn examined inter-imperial cooperation in the human sciences on the African continent after World War II. He showed how colonial governments created institutions for exchanging knowledge and experiences to implement and adapt education programs. Equally important was the theme of (dis)connection. In this regard, ISHITA PANDE (Kingston, Ontario) probed the limits that analytical frameworks like travel and circulation allow. Turning to the lesser-known writings of Hindi essayist Ramnathlal Suman based on a Hindu sexology, she made the case for the need to pay attention to not only circulation but breaks, blocks, intervals/interruptions in the universalization of knowledge.

Both JOSHUA KLEIN (Geneva) and SEBASTIÁN GIL-RIAÑO (Philadelphia) explored the changing political conditions under which different historical actors gave meaning to conceptions of culture. Focusing on the French sociologist Roger Bastide, Klein showed how the concept of “acculturation,” understood as the interpenetration of two cultures, provided an opening for Bastide to interrogate the “destructive forces” of French “civilization.” In a complementary way, Gil-Riaño exposed how the term “acculturation” in the context of the Aché people (Paraguay) disguised many forms of violence. Rather than a normative narrative about modernization, in the 1960s and 70s, a new generation of researchers described the violence engendered in these contacts as “deculturation” and “ethnocide.” Experimenting with scale and space, NANCY ROSE HUNT (Gainesville) sought to reconcile the uneven development of psychiatric infrastructure after formal end of colonialism in the “twin cities” Brazzaville and Kinshasa with their very location, facing each other across the Congo river. The cities are connected through informal trade, share language and culture, and ways of understanding and treating madness, yet partly due to their colonial pasts operate on different scales, tapping into distinct networks.

A third and final theme that endured across the sessions was the problematic of freedom, or the question of agency within the human sciences and in particular the role that the human sciences played in shaping conceptions of liberty, freedom, and consciousness. For instance, ERIK LINSTRUM (Charlottesville) suggested that the transition from colonial rule to postcolonial nation states provided a “live” laboratory for human scientists interested in political legitimacy. As Africans moved into positions of power, the concept of leadership encapsulated both the hope that charismatic leaders could bridge the societal cleavages between old and new but also anxieties about subversion and losing control. There was a belief that education and leadership could foster the kind of attitudes and practices in people required for economic development. ROSA EIDELPES (Vienna) saw the emergence of “alternative ethnology” as an offshoot of 1970s youth culture, and self-alienation as an emancipatory practice against oppressive Western forms of subjectivity. Yet, Eidelpes found that this romantic and orientalist enthusiasm for non-Western alternative forms of living remained a self-centered exercise that made foreign culture subservient to a “mere source of difference.” The psychological effects of being identified as different through white gazes in 1960s Paris lay at the heart of a group of West African psychoanalysts introduced by Mischa Suter. The group’s credit was that they identified racist hostility towards West African migrants as affecting their subject formation, rather than the experience of migration itself, as (white) French psychoanalysts had it.

ANNE SCHULT (St Louis) showed how inter-imperial migration of refugees in the wake of World War I prompted states to commission social scientists to provide statistics on their refugee population, effectively bringing to life the category of refugee, predating any legal definition. Schult observed that after World War II, a growing body of scholarly literature on the psychological dimension of refugees had a racist undertone, where refugees from North Africa were met with skepticism and any kind of resistance to assimilation was pathologized, while white European refugees were deemed as malleable and good workers. ZINE MAGUBANE (Boston) located the evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois’s thinking on Pan-Africanism in a temporal and spatial arc that spans across almost a century and connects the Americas to the African continent, resulting in the emergence of the category of class in his analysis of racial inequality. When, with decolonization, British imperial power was gradually replaced by U.S. imperialism, Du Bois – thanks to his travels and encounters with anti-colonial activists – recognized the civil rights establishment’s complicity with capital and its silence on colonial exploitation in Africa.

Overall, in interrogating the human sciences in decolonization the conference has shown how the process of creating epistemic things is deeply political. They do not simply come into being but are forged through the research process itself. Extending this notion further, an enduring question then becomes the dynamics of contemporary academia. In other words, what if the researchers present at the conference form an epistemic community themselves, owing to their locatedness in the academic landscape and their epistemological grid? Is what we believe to perceive even an elephant? Or, as GOPALAN BALACHANDRAN (Geneva) put it: if we come to understand the human sciences as serially inflicting epistemic violence, what violence do we reproduce today? Similar to how Tilley likened the ostensible end of empires to the fractal, when imperial histories repeat themselves, they can be both simple and complex, but always a bit different. What resources (but also questions) would such repeating – yet differently inflected – histories require beyond interrogating the histories of decolonization? In addition to studying how different grids of knowledge come about, such questions would require a renewed attention to one’s own positions within grids shaped by categories of empire, colonialisms, race, class, and gender.

Conference Overview:

Mischa Suter (Geneva Graduate Institute): Welcome

Panel I: Conjecturing Spaces

Chair: Mischa Suter (Geneva Graduate Institute)

Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Florida, Gainesville): Psy Talk and the Social Sciences in Two Congolese Spaces, 1940s-1970s

Carolyn Biltoft (Geneva Graduate Institute): Systemic Deconstructions and Reconstructions: Psychiatry, Postmodernism, and Global Holism after Decolonization

Allison Sanders (EHESS, Paris): Grey Areas: Researchers between France and Africa at Decolonization

Nana Osei Quarshie (Yale University, New Haven): Political Lunacy and the Making of Independent Ghana

Panel II: Redefining Social Categories

Chair: Gopalan Balachandran (Geneva Graduate Institute)

Zine Magubane (Boston College): W.E.B DuBois and Pan-Africanism: The Impact of Decolonization on His Sociological Imagination

Erik Linstrum (University of Virginia, Charlottesville) Follow the Leader, Not the Elite: Authority and the Human Sciences in the Age of Decolonization

Ishita Pande (Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario): De/Colonizing Sexology: Childhood, the Sciences of Homosexuality, and the Imagination of Hindu India

Anne Schult (Washington University, St Louis): European Refugees at the End of Empire

Keynote Lecture

Helen Tilley (Northwestern University, Evanston): Thinking with Blind Men and Elephants: A Dialogue on Personhood, Empires, and Unknowable Things

Panel III: Sciences as Shifting Fields

Chair: Rémy Amouroux (University of Lausanne)

Damiano Matasci (University of Geneva): A Shared Knowledge? Human Sciences and Inter-imperial Cooperation in Late Colonial Africa

Ian Merkel (University of Groningen): The Human Sciences at the Semi periphery: National Autonomy, North Atlantic Collaborations, and Budding Global South Visions in Postwar Latin America

Joshua Klein (Geneva Graduate Institute): From the Field to the Self: French Anthropology, Social Psychiatry and the Ambiguous Study of Acculturation in the Age of Decolonization, 1950–1980

Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Philadelphia): From “Cultural Change” to “Deculturation”: Making and Molding Cold War Violence in Paraguay during the 1970s

Panel IV: Registering Subjectivity

Chair: Nicole Bourbonnais (Geneva Graduate Institute)

Pokuaa Oduro-Bonsrah (Geneva Graduate Institute): Peering into Intimate Spaces: Psy Scientists and their Observations of Child Rearing Practices in Uganda (1940-1970s)

Leighan Renaud (University of Bristol): Re-Mapping Family Trees in Contemporary Caribbean Literature

Richard Phillips (University of Sheffield): Adventure After Empire: Decolonizing Popular Geographies

Rosa Eidelpes (University of Vienna): Ethnoboom, the Project of an “Alternative Ethnology” and Self-Alienation, or: Decolonizing the European Subject?

Panel V: Universality, Particularity

Chair: David Robertson (University of Oxford)

Sloan Mahone (University of Oxford): From Abeokuta to the World: African Psychiatry and the Struggle for Universality in the Period of Decolonization

Mischa Suter (Geneva Graduate Institute): The Place of Psychosis and the Effects of Racism in the Practice of Psychoanalysis (Paris, Dakar, 1960s)

Concluding Discussion