How do we separate the unified to create division? For Georg Simmel, this began with the mental, whereby the perception of unity or division served to provide operational definitions for human activity, writing that ‘whether… connectedness or… separation is felt to be what was naturally ordained and the respective alternative is felt to be our task, is something that can guide all our activity.’[1] This understanding of human action being the result of either a push for division or fight for inclusion can help to enlighten our approach to underline some of the spatial driving forces of history.

 

For instance, one of the first governmental institutions established by the British in the colony of Rangoon was a lunatic asylum, which the British intended to be a place to exclude the colonially classified neurodivergent from society. To reify such a conception of separation, one of the first requests from the asylum’s superintendents in their annual reports to the Burmese government was for the construction of a wall around the currently unenclosed compound for the asylum’s civil inmates.[2] The wall’s desired effect of separating between the compound’s “inside” and “outside” was represented in the superintendent’s report a few years later[3]:

However, despite the existence of the wall as a delineation between “inside” and “outside” within the minds of the asylum’s planners, there was already a recognition that this illusion was being troubled in reality.

The attempt to nominate the asylum as an exclusionary space had failed since the authorities’ response to the superintendent’s initial request for a wall was the cheaper alternative of planting a bamboo hedge around the asylum’s perimeter.[4] By 1882, the superintendent raised the issue again as the bamboo was failing ‘to protect the patients from the gaze and impertinent curiosity of visitors and from… their presence.’[5] This posed an issue for the superintendent as he could not rigidly impose the labour routines, the moral education, and strict diets that the asylum’s staff believed were necessary to manage or cure the patients’ mental illnesses, since relatives from the town offered alternative sources for, or distractions from, all of these.[6] As family members continued to visit their relatives within the asylum despite the presence of the bamboo, the more significant issue of increasing numbers of escapes from the asylum led to renewed requests to improve the compound’s security, the existing lack thereof being reflected by a change in mapped representations of the asylum featuring a dashed rather than solid line around the civil compound[7]:

What is perhaps more notable is the representation of the asylum by J. C. Clancey from his visit to the town which depicts the asylum as a loose collection of buildings, as opposed to the clearly segregated space of the Rangoon Central Jail sitting opposite[8]:

What this map suggests is that the physical presence of a wall greatly influenced the perception of the purpose for its liminality as existing in the minds of the people walking by the institution; the jail is separated by a wall and the concept of a person’s criminality is understood to warrant their exclusion, while a person’s perceived neurodivergence does not necessitate their exclusion, especially if this is supposedly facilitated by a bamboo hedge.

 

This is not to say that the construction of a wall would have altered how the people of Rangoon viewed neurodivergence overnight, but when the British did commit greater effort into making this an exclusionary institution, the effects on the differences between the town and the asylum’s inmates increased. This intensification was seen in 1929 when the inmates were moved to the town’s new mental hospital, as the asylum was renamed, at Tadagale where barbed wire fencing surrounded the entire compound.[9] Before this movement, while the medical approaches to treating various mental illness had changed to variable degrees and the issue of overcrowding had resulted in a growing proportion of the hospital’s population being criminal, there were still few reported incidents of escapees or released patients causing harm to the wider population. However, the new institution, with its more defined liminality and distance from the town’s general population, allowed for a greater securitisation of the inmates’ bodies and facilitated their increased subjection to new medical regimes. In comparison to the previous relative lack of violence enacted on the population of the town considered to be neuroconforming by the hospital’s inmates, when Fielding Hall issued an order to release the hospital’s population after a false alarm of a Japanese invasion, the town experienced repeated acts of violence and destruction as the British authorities lost all control over the activities of the released inmates.[10] What the causes of this destruction were deserves greater analysis, but the increased violence of the inmates on those not considered neurodivergent after the transition from the old asylum to the new hospital’s more exclusionary space is worth investigating.

 

This blog posting is not meant to present a complete history. However, it shows that Simmel’s suggestion of liminality as a driver for action and a framework for mentalities could provide us with new ways of viewing the effects of such liminality on historical events. As the history of Rangoon’s lunatic asylum suggests, rather than just dismissing the violence enacted after Fielding Hall’s actions as being the result of “madness”, it would be better to explain how this “madness” was constructed, what it meant, and how it became violent, with one possible explanation to all of these questions being the creation of exclusion through the erection of a wall by the British.

[1] Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, (eds.) David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (London, 1997), 171.

[2] Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1878 (Rangoon, 1879), 1.

[3] The Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1882 (Rangoon, 1883).

[4] Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1880 (Rangoon, 1881), 2.

[5] The Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1882, 2.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1893 (Rangoon, 1894).

[8] J. C. Clancey, Aid to Land-Surveying (Calcutta, 1882).

[9] Note on the Mental Hospitals in Burma for the Year 1929 (Rangoon, 1930), 1.

[10] Noel F. Singer, Old Rangoon: City of the Shwedagon (Stirling, 1995), 207.

As I start to think about my long essay, I believe an intriguing space to focus on is cemeteries. The direction I want to go in, however, is unclear at this point. At the top of my head, cemeteries are sacred spaces: places of mourning, worship, connection. They are also spaces of memory. I would like to discuss two articles about cemeteries as a sacred space and as a space/place of rhetorical memory and then decide how I would like to proceed with the direction of my essay.

The first article that will be discussed is Sarkawi Husain’s article Chinese Cemeteries as a Symbol of Sacred Space: Control, Conflict, and Negotiation in Surabaya, Indonesia. This article firstly discussed how Chinese cemeteries in Surabaya, Indonesia, were closing in the 1950s due to urban development and to ‘modernise’ the city – building houses on the land or to “give the city a modern appearance,” especially to emphasise the new independence gained by the country.¹ The closure upset the Chinese community, who saw cemeteries as not only a resting point for the deceased but a place of ancestor worship.² This article highlights how modernisation threatened Chinese cemeteries and practices of Chinese worship. Although this article is an excellent case study into Chinese cemeteries in Indonesia. I believe the article would benefit more from the discussion of sacred spaces and sacred practices more. However, the author does discuss the political repercussions and discussions of the space well. Nonetheless, if I were to discuss what a sacred space was, I would say it is a dynamic space where spirituality and practices of worship ensue.³

Cemeteries as spaces or places of rhetorical memory is another potential direction I could follow for my long essay. An article entitled ‘Rhetorical Spaces in Memorial Places: The Cemetery as a Rhetorical Memory Place/Space’ by Elizabethada Wright focuses on an African American burial ground in New Hampshire, USA and discusses the “essential nature” of a cemetery as a “usual and unusual memory place.”⁴ Wright notes that cemeteries as a physical and spiritual place blur the lines between symbolic and physical to allow public memory that is otherwise forgotten to be remembered.⁵ Her article successfully analyses the connections between memory, space and rhetoric, highlighting the history and other ideas. Her inclusion of gender memory and rhetoric and how women were excluded within public spaces and only could speak within the “correct rhetorical space:” domestic spaces.⁶ Using Foucault’s theory of heterotopia, Wright notes that cemeteries are not usually rhetorical spaces but definitely spaces of memory. She notes that cemeteries are sacred spaces that are “real and unreal,” simultaneously a material space and a symbolic place.⁷ Additionally, she writes that “the cemetery is allowed to exist because it is perceived as not really existing. When bodies are covered over and they as well as their headstones decay, the cemetery will appear to be as if it never existed.”⁸ I believe this is an interesting point because the re-discovery of graves (such as the rediscovered African American graveyard in the article) allows memories to be saved and interpreted. Therefore, it begs the very personal question and uncertainty of how does your memory survive when you die, if not through a grave? Besides that brief existential crisis, I believe this topic is riveting.

Therefore, the direction I would go for my long essay this spring would be cemeteries as spaces of rhetorical memory. However, more research would need to go into the theoretical concepts and finding a case study. Despite this, I believe this is a good starting point.

1. Sarkawi B. Husain, ‘Chinese Cemeteries as a Symbol of Sacred Space: Control, Conflict, and Negotiation in Surabaya, Indonesia’, in Freek Colombijn and Joost Coté (eds), Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960 (ebook, 2015), p. 323. [↩]
2. Ibid., p. 234. [↩]
3. Kim Knott, ‘Spatial Theory and Spatial Methodology, Their Relationship and Application: A Transatlantic Engagement’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 77: 2 (June 2009), p. 420. [↩]
4. Elizabethada A. Wright, ‘Rhetorical Spaces in Memorial Places: The Cemetery as Rhetorical Memory Place/Space’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35: 4 (2005), p. 51. [↩]
5. Ibid. [↩]
6. Ibid., pp. 52-53. [↩]
7. Ibid., p. 54 [↩]
8. Ibid., pp. 54-55. [↩]