Past Event: Chair’s Colloquium: Nana Quarshie

“Spiritual Pawning” with speaker Dr. Nana Quarshie, Department of History and Program in the History of Science and Medicine, and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology. Register here to receive a Zoom link.

About the talk: This talk opens a research agenda on madness and enslavement in Atlantic-era West Africa through a case study of the role of Ga shrines as spaces of mental healing in the Gold Coast, today coastal Ghana, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When shrine priests healed mental distresses, they engaged in spiritual pawning: converting mad persons, thought to owe ritual debts and deemed unfit for sale on the Atlantic market due to mental incapacity, into potential subjects of enslavement. West African shrines were thus spaces of debt recuperation and value conversion–reflecting a broader monetary and ritual economy of capture, enslavement, and raiding that proliferated on Atlantic-era Gold Coast—where potential “refuse slaves” were made, once again, commodifiable.

About the speaker: Quarshie received his doctorate from the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (2020). His first book project, An African Pharmakon, examines the place of psychiatric care in processes of social stratification and in the production of national, regional, and ethnic diversity in West Africa. This research has been supported by the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the Race, Law, and History Fellowship at the Michigan Law School, and the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), among others. At Yale, Quarshie teaches courses on the global history of psychiatry and confinement, African systems of thought, and on historical methods beyond the archive.

About the Chair’s Colloquium Series: Talks in the Anthropology Department Chair’s Colloquium Series, held once a semester, feature scholars whose research is of broad interest in and beyond Anthropology. Invited speakers for these department-wide events rotate around areas of disciplinary and interdisciplinary specialization.