Asylums, families and the state.

Abstract

In a review of recent work on institutionalisation, Michael Ignatieff (History Workshop Journal 15) has suggested that more attention needs to be paid to the role of the working class family in reconstructing the place of incarceration in modern societies. This should be part he argues, of a broader re-orientation of social history, which should start from the 'assumption that a society is a densely woven fabric of permissions, prohibitions, obligations and rules, sustained and enforced at a thousand points rather than a neatly organized pyramid of power'. In that 'fabric' the total institution was but 'one relay, one thread'. New forms of the state, Ignatieff suggests, may be 'partly creations of those classes which they are intended to control'. Thus his emphasis on the necessity of examining the relationship between the institution and its social environs, between families, classes and incarceration.' Ignatieff's statement is an invitation to those who have worked in the field to reflect on their own work and on some of his hypotheses. In what follows I want to take up this invitation in offering some concrete examples of the process of institutionalisation and suggesting some refinements to the thesis outlined by Ignatieff in relation to one particular institution: the lunatic asylum. My research has been principally in Australia and Ireland so the material I have to offer and the refinements I suggest draw on contexts which differed from those of the industrialised cities of Victorian Britain. But there are lessons to be drawn from that difference for our understanding of institutionalisation, its appropriation by masters for a variety of purposes, its use by classes with a range of intentions. The hazards of writing about the asylum without examining the process