#  Friday Morning Seminar in Culture, Psychiatry and Global Mental Health 

 



    ![Two-toned coral graphic background with the name of the seminar in white on top.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-04/Seminar%20Friday%20Morning%20Culture.png?itok=xntNXQ_Q) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 30, 2026** 

 10:00AM - 12:00PM EDT 

 [ Attend this event via Zoom arrow\_circle\_right ](https://harvard.zoom.us/j/97613960148?pwd=HMGrS5fjCXQjcWubp7u9LLWz2w6Osv.1) 

 



 

## African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return

West Africans were far from passive victims of European-imposed psychiatric concepts and institutions. Rather, they enchanted the British colonial asylum in Accra (contemporary Ghana) by accommodating European psychiatric practices principally as experiences within the dynamic tapestry of African ritual and political concerns over territorial control, bodily afflictions, and psychological belonging within families, communities, and states. African people mobilized practices associated by the mid-nineteenth century with healing and harming at shrines of territorial spirits to politically harness the development of psychiatric social control. That is, European psychiatry did not colonize African minds, nor did it displace African psychotherapeutic norms. It was instead built on and grafted onto a repertoire of African healing and harming practices through socio-economic, political, and ritual transactions that, in the case of coastal Ghana, unfolded over the course of centuries.

### Speaker

- Nana Osei Quarshie, Assistant Professor, Yale University.

### Moderator

- Byron Good, Faculty Associate. Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Social Anthropology Program, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.

### Contact

**Francesco Rolando**  
[francesco\_rolando@g.harvard.edu](mailto:francesco_rolando@g.harvard.edu)



 

 



 

 See also:- [ 2026–2027 ](/academic-year/2026-2027)
- [ Friday Morning Seminar in Culture, Psychiatry and Global Mental Health ](/seminars/global_mental_health/schedule)
 
 

 Share on:- [     Facebook ](#)
- [     Twitter ](#)
- [     Linkedin ](#)
 


 Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/node/1935816/event-feed.ics)  Copy link link