Ruling Minds

Erik Linstrum

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674915305
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

At its zenith in the early twentieth century, the British Empire ruled nearly one-quarter of the world's inhabitants. As they worked to exercise power in diverse and distant cultures, British authorities relied to a surprising degree on the science of mind. Ruling Minds explores how psychology opened up new possibilities for governing the empire. From the mental testing of workers and soldiers to the use of psychoanalysis in development plans and counterinsurgency strategy, psychology provided tools for measuring and managing the minds of imperial subjects. But it also led to unintended consequences.Following researchers, missionaries, and officials to the far corners of the globe, Erik Linstrum examines how they used intelligence tests, laboratory studies, and even dream analysis to chart abilities and emotions. Psychology seemed to offer portable and standardized forms of knowledge that could be applied to people everywhere. Yet it also unsettled basic assumptions of imperial rule. Some experiments undercut the racial hierarchies that propped up British dominance. Others failed to realize the orderly transformation of colonized societies that experts promised and officials hoped for. Challenging our assumptions about scientific knowledge and empire, Linstrum shows that psychology did more to expose the limits of imperial authority than to strengthen it.

I

MINDS

CHAPTER ONE

The Laboratory in the Field

Inventing Imperial Psychology

THE WEATHER was calm and bright when the Duke of Westminster launched into the Thames at midday. It was March 10, 1898, and the Royal Albert Dock was crowded with well-wishers waving handkerchiefs in the air as the steamship moved toward the sea. A group of men on board watched their families recede into the distance, then settled in for a long journey, gazing at the stars and watching phosphorescent fish dart through the water as night fell.¹ The six of them were bound for the islands that studded the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea. Alfred Cort Haddon, the leader of the expedition, was a naturalist, ethnographer, and Cambridge University lecturer who had first traveled to the region a decade earlier. Sidney Ray was a London schoolteacher with an unlikely expertise in indigenous languages, and Anthony Wilkin was a recent Cambridge graduate commissioned to take photographs. The other three—W. H. R. Rivers, Charles Myers, and William McDougall—were medical men with an unprecedented mission. Along with a fourth British doctor, Charles Seligman, who joined the expedition from Australia, they set out to investigate the psychology of Britain’s overseas subjects with newly invented experimental methods. It would be “the first time,” Haddon later observed, “that a well-equipped psychological laboratory had been established among a people scarcely a generation removed from perfect savagery.”²

For these pioneers of psychology in the British Empire, the juxtaposition of archaic and modern would become almost routine. Nearly two decades later, Rivers returned from the remote Pacific island chain of the New Hebrides to treat British soldiers stricken with shell shock, famously drawing on Freud to help the war poet Siegfried Sassoon regain his senses during the First World War. Myers went on to amass a collection of traditional music from around the world while also serving as a shell shock specialist and later as the director of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Although McDougall drew on ethnographic accounts of “primitive” warfare to construct his theory of human psychology governed by instinct, he too made use of Freud and even entered psychoanalysis with Jung himself.³ These contrasts all had their origin in the Torres Strait. Living in the region for at least six months, the Cambridge researchers helped to establish the ethnographic ideal of fieldwork, with its insistence on absorbing the particularities of an alien world “from the inside.”⁴ But in the hilltop house on Murray Island—where they performed experiments on the perception of indigenous people with a wide array of instruments—they also laid the foundation of an alternative tradition. By reconstructing the ostensibly universal space of the laboratory in an unfamiliar and distant environment, they were not simply observing difference but attempting to make it comprehensible and manageable.⁵ The house on Murray Island, then, was not so much a “laboratory of modernity”—where the imperial context provided freedom to innovate away from constraints at home—as a testing ground for the portability of techniques conceived in European laboratories.⁶ As they recorded measurements of vision, hearing, and reaction time, the Cambridge men were also testing whether the tools of Western psychology could be usefully applied so far from their place of origin.

The experiments conducted in the Torres Strait in 1898–1899 marked the opening act in a long series of attempts to map the mental life of Britain’s imperial subjects. Unlike the evolutionary thinkers of the late Victorian era, the Cambridge men did not rely on data collected by others; they made observations of their own, bringing the laboratory methods pioneered by physiologists into the field for the first time. They also focused their efforts on a single community, testing around four hundred fifty individuals and getting to know them in the course of repeated encounters. In the Torres Strait, the laboratory and the field—mechanical instruments and personal experience—were not opposed but complementary, blending objectivity and immediacy to create a new kind of research in the human sciences.⁷

But the expedition’s novelty was not only a matter of method. Belying the assumption that technology served as a reliable “tool of empire,” laboratory experiments in the Torres Strait undermined the psychological assumptions of imperial ideology at the turn of the century.⁸ Even instruments governed by strict procedures and freighted with theoretical assumptions—devices “dense with meaning”—could produce unexpected results and unsettling conclusions.⁹ While armchair theorists portrayed colonized minds as inferior in ability, resistant to change, and lacking in individuality, the Cambridge researchers found evidence of intelligence, adaptability, and diversity instead. Criticizing the idea of a “primitive mentality” and—in one case—launching a parliamentary campaign on an anticolonial platform, they came to question whether the distinctions and hierarchies underlying imperial rule were so clear-cut after all.

¶ BEFORE THE ADVENT of the laboratory in the late nineteenth century, British thinkers privileged observation and experience over instruments and experiments as sources of knowledge about mental life. The physiognomic outlook of Victorian psychology held that surface appearances mirrored inner states—whether indelible traits of character or momentary bursts of passion—in a predictable way.¹⁰ This tradition of “ocularcentrism” was, if anything, stronger in the imperial context. Although the epistemological value of fieldwork remained uncertain until the second half of the century, descriptions recorded by educated European travelers were long seen as reliable data about indigenous people and landscapes.¹¹ Throughout the nineteenth century, British officials in colonies around the world believed that they could gather useful information by observing their subjects face-to-face. Mistrusting written reports and indigenous subordinates as sources of knowledge about public opinion, they insisted on touring their territories and monitoring the crowds assembled at big public meetings.¹² Whether termed “sympathy” or “tact,” the ability to grasp the collective mood in an instant was considered an essential but also an attainable skill for administrators in the field.¹³

Although scientific claims about the intelligence and emotions of imperial subjects sometimes drew on quantitative data—including, notoriously, skull measurements—quantification proved superfluous for many researchers.¹⁴ This was true in part because physical features readily perceived by the trained eye—smooth-haired versus woolly-haired, “long-headed” versus “broad-headed”—served as the basis for defining racial groups. Even an inveterate quantifier like the mental-testing pioneer Francis Galton collected almost no measurements during his African travels in the 1850s, relying instead on skin color and facial features to guide his classifications.¹⁵ But universal models of psychology also contributed to faith in visual knowledge. In an especially famous case, Charles Darwin in 1867 circulated a questionnaire to overseas missionaries for his study on the expression of emotion, asking them to observe whether astonishment raised eyebrows, anger curled lips, and embarrassment flushed cheeks in India and Africa as in Europe. He concluded that “the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity,” demonstrating “the close similarity in bodily structure and mental disposition of all the races of mankind.”¹⁶

In the late Victorian years, however, this belief in the transparency of mental life everywhere was shadowed by growing doubts. After rebellions in India in 1857 and Jamaica in 1865, anxieties about the inscrutability of the so-called “native mind” proliferated.¹⁷ As Raj administrator George Trevelyan wrote almost a decade after the uprising on the subcontinent, “their inner life still remains a sealed book to us.” Contemporaries described African minds as even more opaque: the inhospitable climate of the “White Man’s Grave” and the unfamiliarity of indigenous languages contributed to the sense that “the native mind [there] works on a different plane from that of the European,” as a handbook for imperial officials put it around the turn of the century.¹⁸ The distinctions drawn between diverse cultures and far-flung continents amounted to variations on the same theme: an epistemic crisis in imperial psychology. Armchair anthropologist Sir John Lubbock identified the crux of the problem in 1870. “The whole mental condition of a savage is so different from ours,” he wrote, “that it is often very difficult to understand the motives by which he is influenced.” At a time when the transformational promise of liberal imperialism was giving way to sharper-edged distinctions of political and racial authority, the possibility of understanding colonized minds looked increasingly problematic from the British perspective.¹⁹

Attempting to reconcile the universal biological responses chronicled by Darwin with this deepening sense of difference, late Victorian thinkers recast the science of mind as a set of evolutionary hierarchies. Since John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), British psychology had been dominated by sensationalist and associationist theories of knowledge, tracing the most complex ideas back to perceptions of the world. As John Stuart Mill put it in 1873, the connections forged in the mind followed “the real connexions between Things, not dependent on our will and feelings,” so that “things which are always joined together in Nature . . . cohere more and more closely in our thoughts.”²⁰ For evolutionary theorists, the mind’s tendency to learn from experience ensured that animal impulses in human nature would not inevitably thwart rationality. Instead, they argued, each generation adapted mentally to the environment and transmitted its improvements to the next. Evolutionists continued to debate whether the means of transmission among Homo sapiens was biological or social: Herbert Spencer held that instincts or reflexes developed into the subtler operations of memory and reason through a Lamarckian process of inheritance; others, like C. Lloyd Morgan, insisted that advantageous ideas were embedded in culture rather than the nervous system. But all agreed that the power of the environment to mold minds explained how conscious thought came to dominate unreflective impulses over the course of evolutionary time. When late Victorian neurologists referred to “higher” and “lower” mental functions, they confirmed a narrative of human development in which intellect gradually triumphed over instinct.²¹

From the British perspective, this narrative had the virtue of explaining, and perhaps justifying, the vast disparities in wealth and technology of societies among human societies. Defining prosperity as the byproduct of psychology validated a Victorian truism: that success in life represented the reward for hard work, foresight, and abstinence from sensual pleasures. According to this logic, Britain had leapfrogged past other societies—India inspired analogies to Saxon villages, while Africa drew comparisons to the more distant past of primeval hunter-gatherers—because the subordination of instinct to reason had proceeded so much further there. Spencer, perhaps the most influential proponent of this view, catalogued the defects that defined “primitive man” with an emphasis on failures of psychological efficiency: “impulsiveness,” “improvidence,” incapacity for complex thought, and preoccupation with “meaningless details.” Even those who insisted that biological evolution was no longer an active force in differentiating human populations agreed that heightened powers of rationality and restraint distinguished “civilized” from “primitive” groups. The assumption that all knowledge was derived from the steady accumulation of sensory experience encouraged a finely graded view of human diversity in which mental, moral, and material differences corresponded neatly.²²

In this way, evolutionary theory furnished an explicitly hierarchical schema for structuring the observation of colonized minds. It also offered a rationale for considering those minds legible. Where traditional communities like the caste, tribe, or village reigned, Victorian thinkers argued that the imperatives of group cohesion—embodied in elaborate ceremonies, rigid hierarchies, and strict sanctions for violating rules—created an environment that allowed for minimal variation in intelligence and temperament. Among the individuals in any one “primitive” society, in other words, homogeneity ruled—a corollary of the evolutionary principle that human groups inevitably progressed from simplicity to complexity. As the dean of British anthropology, Edward Tylor, put it, “there is to be found such regularity in the composition of societies of men, that we can drop individual differences out of sight, and thus can generalize on the arts and opinions of whole nations.” Invoking the “amazing sameness” of “savage nations,” Walter Bagehot stated this more succinctly: “when you have seen one Fuegian, you have seen all Fuegians.”²³ Even Spencer, who did so much to define the “primitive” as a generic bundle of instinct, assumed that psychology varied strictly as a function of ethnic identity. Compiled from ethnographies and travel narratives, his encyclopedic Descriptive Sociology (1873–1881) presented “a comprehensive account” of groups around the world—including “emotional” and “intellectual” characteristics—in elaborate charts covering the pages of eight oversized volumes. While words like impulsive and incapable appear frequently, Spencer also noted aptitudes and dispositions that diverged from the norm. The so-called “Kaffirs” of southern Africa had a “quick power of comprehension and capacity of patient attention”; Bushmen were “lively, frank, and generous”; Fijians were “quick to receive ideas, both simple and complex.” In Spencer’s portrayal, the world contained an endless diversity of character types, but the psychological uniformity of “primitive” groups made generalizations possible.²⁴

When applied to colonized populations, the language of group psychology often served as a language of rule. The recruiting policy of the Indian Army after 1857, which favored Punjabis, Sikhs, and other groups prized for their courage and toughness, is the best-known example of this.²⁵ But linking mental qualities with ethnic identities was a common technique of British rule across the empire. Stereotypes about martial races, lazy tribes, and other groups both favored and disfavored helped officials to make sense of the unfamiliar; th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Minds
• Part II: Tests
• Part III: Experts
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index