Anthropology

French theorist Michel Foucault has been described as a social theorist, a historian, and a philosopher. His works are the result of his engagement with approaches and concerns discovered within these disciplines. His writings traverse a wide range of fields and topics. However, he is interested at many times in analyzing the social construction of concepts of mental illness, systems of discipline and punishment, sexuality and subjectivity and the relation between knowledge and power. His inquiries adopt the methodology of providing a detailed analysis of the historical advancement of these notions. Overall, his concerns might be more correctly understood as falling within the realm of politics.

    Foucaults development as an intellectual can be summed-up in two different stages. First, is the work he generates during the 60s that has developed an archeological and historical mode of investigation. The aim of such an approach is to uncover the genesis of human sciences and the development of the modern episteme. Second is Foucaults later works that turns towards a Nietzchean-inspired genealogical or inheritable form of investigation. This approach supplements the earlier historical analysis by revealing the underlying power relations inherent in discourses of knowledge.

Foucaults Ideology Knowledge is Power
    Foucault believes that the self is mainly a political notion that must be subjected to stringent criticism. It only shows that he is not a humanist. He holds that a clarification of the dominant practices within any form of social organization is important to that forms being subjected to critique. Unlike other Marxist, he rejects any project that would seek to provide a harmonious resolution of social antagonism by way of reference to a meta-narrative. Therefore, his turn to Nietzsche is at the same time turn away from more traditional forms of analysis. He then offers an account of the political development of discourses of knowledge that takes all knowledge forms to be definable in terms of power relations. Indeed, for Foucault, the terms power and knowledge are closely related, in that they necessarily summon one another.

    Ideology according to Foucault
  
    Appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. First, ideology always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Second, ideology is a concept that always refers back to something of the order of a subject, and third, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. (Foucault 1980118)

This states that ideology-talk presupposes truth-talk and Foucault has no time for disinterested, objective conceptions of truth. His doubt of truth stems from his view that all social relations are relations of power. In so far as all knowledge claims have power relations within them. In other words, Foucaults view of knowledge is something that occurs in the center of power relations.

Madness and Civilization (1965)

    In the book Madness and Civilization, Foucault tracks the history of insanity or madness from the Renaissance until the 19th century. His main subjects are the cultural, intellectual and economic institutions encompassing the concept of madness. In studying madness, he discusses the way in which civilization interacts with madmen, and attempts to advocate for madmen. His account is interesting because he does not start from the nature of mental illness and ask how well this was reflected in classical thinking. It starts from the institutions that shut up the mad. What is good in his work is the focus on the connections between knowledge and institutions. He examines practices within the asylum and focuses on two instancesthe reforming of Bicetre by Pinel into asylum for insane and the setting-up of Tuke of an English quaker asylumand describes asylum life modeled on bourgeois ideology.  One example is in Tukes Retreat, the mad were treated as children (Foucault 1965252). They were put under tutelage in a model of family relations that was both bourgeois and patriarchal. The insane in the Retreat was submitted to the authority of the father and to care of a rational adult.

    After publishing Madness and Civilization, Foucault became a leading intellectual in the world. He later died of AIDS in June 1984. His other works focused on the maginalized aspects of society that includes The Order of Things, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. Given the fact that Foucault was hospitalized in his 20s for depression one could interpret his work as being partially a renunciation of the psychiatric structure of power. Thus Aristotle rightly observed that melancholics have more intelligence than other men.(118) He portrays madness as having been subjugated by civilization. This book was seen by some as leading the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s in that it attacked the notion that insanity has always been seen as a threat to the society.
  
    Foucault is concerned with analyzing the structures surrounding madness. He talks about their development, their history, and the overthrow of one structure by another. For example, madness held a place among the hierarchy of vices in the 13th century (24). During the 14th and 15th centuries, the works of Cervantes (28) and Shakespeare (30) describe madness in terms of moral satire. With the creation of the Hospital General in 1656, there is a shift in structure madness no longer occupies a place in society, but rather is relegated to confinement (39). In discussing psychiatry in the 17th and 18th centuries, Foucault states that his aim is to show the specific faces by which madness was recognized in the classical thought (117).

    Foucault traces this very specific growth of the structures of madness through history. He tried to find a point in the history of insanity at which it became an undifferentiated experience (ix). He proposed that madness is inherited from leprosy a segregated space in society (6). From there, madness came to be viewed as moral failing that required imprisonment. Eventually, the confinement of madness moved from the prison to the hospital (39).

    While these structures take control over individuals in Madness and Civilization, Foucault discusses and stands for the mentally ill. He studied the status and condition of madmen within prisons, hospitals, and workhouses (38). He calls that modern man no longer communicates with the madman (x). He describes how insanity was seen as spectacle and scandal (69) and also argues that even the freeing of madmen from confinement was not a philanthropic move, but a political one (221). However, Foucault stops short of giving the madman true historical agency he is much more likely to describe the effect of society on the madman rather than the individuals agency. He also contest that the alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to a conventional bourgeois morality. In short, Foucault argued that what was presented, as an objective scientific discovery was in fact the product of a very famous social and ethical commitment.
  
    Foucault started his discussion through setting the stage in Europe with the end of leprosy and the end of the middle ages. He described the institutions made around the lepers as holding the same characteristics that would be applied to the insane in later centuries. These include the inclusion of the leper into religion as being punished by God in this life so as to receive immediate redemption in the next. He believes that as leprosy diminished in the societies of Europe the bodys sickness were replaced with sickness in the mind. Changing the lepers as being confined within society were the insane who had been previously viewed as part of society. He noted that insanity had been called folly, which was merely a sin rather than an ailment. He then traces the origins of confining the insane as being linked to an increased use of confinement in society. Shifting from ships of fools upon which the insane were bound to end haphazardly reunited with water to the great confinement, Foucault outlines how insanity shifted from being something excluded and hidden to being ingrained and included through the use of public and central confinement. Confinement became both a tool of society for production and image. Confinement of the insane allowed them to be forced into productive capacities such as polishing glass or to be put on public display for a penny a gander. At the same time this use of the insane embodied the idea that the animalistic needed to be contained to protect the civilized from the barbaric, mirroring how the common citizen must conform to the standards set by the church and state to become productive. Madness had become something to be feared, for the madman could withstand inhuman conditions, extreme ranges of temperatures, and was only made productive through extremely difficult treatment and also he continues in the advancement of madness through the modern period through analyzing the role of the doctor and patient and the birth of the asylum as being the separation of the insane from the poor and criminal. This change in thinking can be viewed as the insane were no longer cast away with thieves and the poor but were institutionalized into asylums apart from the decadents.

    Foucault allotted a large amount of thinking to the relationship between insanity and economics. He suggested that hospitals were used to confine poor and unemployed workers, and to shut down a growing workers movement. Here, he depicted madmen as a class rejected or rendered mobile by economic developments (47). It was at this time, when labor was regarded as a remedy to poverty (55), that the poor who were incapable of working or integrating with the group were perceived as madmen (64). For him, civilization is favorable to insanity (217). The cultural, economic at intellectual structures surrounding madness do not exist when considering a solitary individual. Madness is a label of sorts that civilization places on individuals apart from civilization, madness is largely a matter of unifying the soul with the body through the passions (85-88).  It is those structures that determined the nature of madness, as well as how madness and civilization connect to each other. Michel Foucault made a dialectical relationship between cause and effect in which the structures themselves both influence and are influenced by their intellectual, cultural, and economic component parts. Underneath these structures, he pointed out that civilization itself is the root of madness.

    The significance of Madness and Civilization is best seen not in terms of Foucaults own contribution but as a collective transformation in social theorizing. His way to history embodied a new skepticism of meta-narratives. Instead of trusting the descriptions of the past we have created, he seeks to grasp how some aspects of society have been marginalized and repressed from writing their own histories. Thus his approach to writing history is that of bringing together the rational structures that have been preserved with their irrational origins that have been forgotten. Through describing madness as entirely occupying the void left by leprosy in society, Foucault describes a rather coincidental rather than progressive move in our society. This description thus supposes that had leprosy persisted, insanity may have not become excluded from society, rather than describe society as systematically purging itself of its ills.

    Foucault and his historiography touch on a general doubt of the narratives of our modern histories. His competence to construct a new narrative of the advancement of civilization with madness, he had weakened the modern structure of psychiatry. In his last part, Foucault discusses how in art one bring to an end to being insane but merely expressive. Through recognizing ones expression as art or narrative one stops to be insane but merely creative or expressive. Insanity then is not a clinical science but an inability to creative a narrative. For these reasons as parts of society fail to legitimate their expression they became subject to the narratives of psychiatry. Thus Foucaults histories seek to construct new comprehensive narratives to legitimate otherwise marginalized aspects of society.

    According to Foucault, madness will manifest itself through art or literature, such as with Nietzsche and Goya (279, 281) and true communication with civilization. In this way, Foucault describes a paradoxical history of madness in which, while treatment of madness has become more humane, the state of the madman is regressive. Recent works of madness, such as those by, Nietzsche, and Van Gogh, developed an environment in which civilization must justify itself before madness (289). Foucault suggests not only a historical backtrack of madness to the point where it was an undifferentiated experience (ix), but also a literal return to such a environment wherein there is again dialog between madness and civilization.

    Lastly, Foucaults work tried to show how we have indirectly constituted ourselves through the exclusion of some others criminals, madmen, women and black people. This exclusion depends on power.  The purpose of his comparison between past and present is to problematise culture, just like other anthropological studies. We can now conclude that Foucaults project is truly deconstructive it is to bring down the modern narratives through constructing his own in paradoxical opposition.