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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\u2019s superintendents in their annual reports to the Burmese government was for the construction of a wall around the currently unenclosed compound for the asylum\u2019s civil inmates.[2]<\/a> The wall\u2019s desired effect of separating between the compound\u2019s \u201cinside\u201d and \u201coutside\u201d was represented in the superintendent\u2019s report a few years later[3]<\/a>:<\/p>\n However, despite the existence of the wall as a delineation between \u201cinside\u201d and \u201coutside\u201d within the minds of the asylum\u2019s planners, there was already a recognition that this illusion was being troubled in reality.<\/span><\/p>\n The attempt to nominate the asylum as an exclusionary space had failed since the authorities\u2019 response to the superintendent\u2019s initial request for a wall was the cheaper alternative of planting a bamboo hedge around the asylum\u2019s perimeter.[4]<\/a> By 1882, the superintendent raised the issue again as the bamboo was failing \u2018to protect the patients from the gaze and impertinent curiosity of visitors and from\u2026 their presence.\u2019[5]<\/a> 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\u2019s staff believed were necessary to manage or cure the patients\u2019 mental illnesses, since relatives from the town offered alternative sources for, or distractions from, all of these.[6<\/a>]<\/a> 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 rene<\/span>wed requests to improve the compound\u2019s 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<\/span>[7]<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n 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]<\/a>:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s criminality is understood to warrant their exclusion, while a person\u2019s perceived neurodivergence does not necessitate their exclusion, especially if this is supposedly facilitated by a bamboo hedge.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s inmates increased. This intensification was seen in 1929 when the inmates were moved to the town\u2019s new mental hospital, as the asylum was renamed, at Tadagale where barbed wire fencing surrounded the entire compound.[9]<\/a> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s general population, allowed for a greater securitisation of the inmates\u2019 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\u2019s inmates, when Fielding Hall issued an order to release the hospital\u2019s 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]<\/a> 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\u2019s more exclusionary space is worth investigating.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This blog posting is not meant to present a complete history. However, it shows that Simmel\u2019s 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\u2019s lunatic asylum suggests, rather than just dismissing the violence enacted after Fielding Hall\u2019s actions as being the result of \u201cmadness\u201d, it would be better to explain how this \u201cmadness\u201d 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.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings<\/em>, (eds.) David Frisby & Mike Featherstone (London, 1997), 171.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1878<\/em> (Rangoon, 1879), 1.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> The Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1882<\/em> (Rangoon, 1883).<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1880<\/em> (Rangoon, 1881), 2.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> The Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1882<\/em>, 2.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Ibid<\/em>.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Report on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum for the Year 1893<\/em> (Rangoon, 1894).<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> J. C. Clancey, Aid to Land-Surveying<\/em> (Calcutta, 1882).<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Note on the Mental Hospitals in Burma for the Year 1929<\/em> (Rangoon, 1930), 1.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/blog-pic-1-300x220.png\")
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