What Is A Total Institution

What Is A aggregate constitutionThis paper will argue that the mock up of the core world go off offer insight into the workings of the Caribbean plunder orchard under thraldom. In at allure to make this connection, it is essentially looking at the manakin in the get a carriage of the history of the sugar plantation, as well as looking at the history through the lens of the theory. And so it will argue that the model offers some insight, yet that on that purpose argon clear limits to its applicability. The theory of the sum institution is a theory of traffichips, non of the institution that contains them.Also the range is not to argue that the plantations were designed as add together institutions, but that the thorough institution model contains widely applicable truths or so the nature of kind-hearted social organisations, and the place that individuals find in them, that explain particular aspects of the plantation.The cardinal great difference mingled w ith the plantation and the total institutions that inspired the suppuration of the concept is that the purpose of plantations is profit, through the production of a commodity, while this is rargonly the case with asylums and prisons even if they are run for profit, their aim is to achieve insure, not to produce anything by means of this adjudge.What is a total institution?Total institution is a concept introduced by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his book Asylums Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) to describe an institution that functions by monopolising the reality of those inmates it seeks to control. There are two aspects of the concept that link to the institution of the sugar plantation. The first concerns the way in which indicator is exercised to a degree that makes all those involved as inmates and supervisors bound to follow its dictates. The total institution is one which encompasses every aspect of its inma tes relationship with the world, and controls them by dogmatic their understanding and their motivations. The other aspect of the total institution concerns the inmates themselves they internalise the rules and perspectives of the institution, and doctor themselves by their standards essentially investing their identity in the role they are taught to play. Goffman argued that this was true of those with potential in the institution, as well as those whose conduct and consciousness it was designed to shape.Perhaps the about important thing about this model, with respect to the sugar plantations, is that Goffman did not see the total institution as a narrowly delineate withall, invented to control inmates, on the lines of Jeremy Benthams Panopticon (Smith, 2008). Rather, it is a inborn outcome of the evolution of universal human and social realities within institutions which enlist their final stages through a close control over the circumstances and behaviour of their inm ates, be manage this control is effective.The superpower of the total institutionThe most powerful crinkle for the usefulness of the total institution model with respect to the sugar plantation is the way in which the plantation could function with such minimal tangible control.Murrell (2000, 14) suggests that religion played a central role in achieving the supremacy that allowed slavery to persist. The colonial and ambiguous role of religion in the enculturation of the plantation economies cannot be pursued here in any detail, but it seems fair to suggest that religion played the role that the therapeutic and prescriptive discourse of psychology plays in Goffmans account of the asylum.A measure of the power of the slave plantation as a total institution, one which wrought the behaviour and understanding of its inmates, would be the longevity of the social relations it fructifyd between people. The extent that plantation economies, along with the racial domination and compo und power that enabled them, survived after the abolition of slavery suggests the degree to which the social relations and identities defined during slavery had shaped the word-view of cultivateer slaves and their descendants.And slavery, in exercising nearly unlimited domination over people seen as naturally subordinate, impose a model of family structure and gender relations on slaves which served the scotch interests of their masters,(Wiltshire-Brodber, 2002) without respect for the innate desire which all people contrive for the conversance and security of a family. According to the total institution model, this would result in slaves embracing the roles defined for them, and internalising the identities that these roles define. And there is evidence of this effect in the way that gender relations in Caribbean societies, especially among the poorest sectors of society, continue to reflect mannikins and identities that have their roots in the logic of the plantation. Matril ocal patterns of family structure and a strong spirit in the value of female autonomy are combined with a strong patriarchal ideology (Momsen, 2002).Limits of the total institution model.While the total institution model can explain a great adopt about the manner in which plantations functioned under slavery, there are limits to its applicability. These limits move under two categories, which correspond, in a sensation, the perspectives of those controlling, and those controlled by, the institution of the plantation. The first station of limits is illustrated by the many ways in which the total institution was subverted. The pattern of these subversive activities varied from island to island, and probably from plantation to plantation, included the survival of African religions, hidden or evolved into syncretic African-Christian take a craps such as sateria and used to define an identity distinct from that hypocritically imposed by western spectral institutions, the attentio n of secret practices, from planning for rebellion to distilling to informal patterns of domination and association, and the repair to escape, at least on larger islands.Religion is interesting in that it so clearly plays an ambiguous role as an institution in the history of slavery. On the one hand, it contained elements that helped define a collective identity that subverted plantation authority. On the other hand, it was a source of comfort and control that made plantation life bearable and persuaded slaves not to rebel. It was partly an avouchment of African identity, partly a European lesson in being gist with ones place. In the famous words of Karl Marx, religion was at the same snip the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress.the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. (Marx, 1843/2002)Economics and the limits of the total institutionThe total institution is not generally an stinting unit as well. It tends to exist as in the case of asylums, prisons, concentration camps in order to control the behaviour of those who are institutionalised. If it has an economy, in the narrow sense, it is an economy of efficient control, or exists to occupy people, handle political prisoners in a way that pays for the costs of the institution that imprisons them. The sugar plantation was an grandly profitable frugal institution, however, and the economic models that evolved to produce sugar, the justifications for slavery and murderous racial oppression these entailed, and the social structures that emerged to make this violent form of slavery work, should all be seen in the light of the economic motivations they elected.It is tempting to imagine that slave societies did not obey a strict economic logic, in the same sense that capitalist societies do. Some historians (e.g. Genovese, 1989) have act to make this point in order to define capitalisms distinctly ratio nalising, dehumanising and commodifying logic. just it seems clear that plantations were subject to economic logic. The difference in plantation models between those colonies most reliant on a steady arrival of juvenile slaves, such as Haiti and those less so, illustrates that the economic exigencies defined by a particular form of productive activity are real and complex. The military strength of the exploitation that characterised Haiti is well established (Bellegarde-Smith, 1990). The economic limitations on the function of the plantation as a total institution are also, in a sense, the limits that the total institution model defines for the economic activities involved.Plantation economies were dedicated to do money, and they made a great deal of it for their plantation owners and their colonial rulers. They were for the most part seen as primitive and unpleasant places by those who made their immense fortunes there rather than societies with any redeeming, justifying values or institutions. An individual or institution dedicated to making money does not exercise more(prenominal) physical control than is necessary. Physical control is expensive, in the number of overseers it requires and in the limits it imposes on the activities of working people. And in the case of an economic unit bid a slave plantation, with its vastly-outnumbered overseers, too much control might cause as much unrest as it prevents. It makes better economic sense to find the balance between too much control and too little, and to live with the limits (rebellion, subversive religious and magical practices, escape, clandestine romance and lower-ranking economic activities) that this permits. The most extreme form of resistance is rebellion itself, and there were many rebellions, large and small, among the slaves of the Caribbean. Perhaps one measure of the degree to which economic calculation dominated the logic of plantation slavery is that the possibility of rebellion persisted perhaps it made more economic sense to risk the occasional(a) bloodbath than to exercise the degree of rigorous control that would reduce the risk. endThe total institution model applies to institutions that function by means of control over the perceptions and sentiments of their inmates, rather than by means of physical force. This paper has argued that the model offers insights into the way in which slave plantation societies functioned, and were able to exercise such cruel authority with recourse to so little active control. The plantation is in fact a good test and confirmation of the model. The power that plantation owners and the government forces that supported them exercised was absolute, but it was not exercised in the form of absolute physical control.This paper has also argued that there are limits to the applicability of the model which reflect the economic motives driving the institution of the plantation. The strength and persistence of the cultural legacy of slave ry in syncretic religions, in family structures and of a social order that allowed plantation agriculture to continue after the end of slavery all paint a picture of a complex reality in which the control of the total institution extended no further than was necessary to ensure a profitable sugar industry.The point is that the model of the total institution illuminates general truths about the nature of authority that help explain how and why, once the decision was made to develop Caribbean economies on the basis of slavery was, why the institution of slavery actual developed there as it did, why it persevered, and why in the case of Haiti it was overcome.References CitedBellegarde-Smith, P. (1990) Haiti The Breached Citadel. Westview Press.Genovese, Eugene D. (1989) The political Economy of Slavery Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. Middletown,CT Methodist University Press.Goffman, Erving. (1961) Asylums Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Me ntal Patients and Other InmatesMarx, Karl bath C. Raines (2002) Marx on Religion Editor John C. Raines Philadlphia Temple University Press, 2002Momsen, Janet. The Double Paradox, in Gendered Realities Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought Editor Patricia Mohammed Kingston University of the West Indies Press, 2002Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel (2000) chancy Memories, Underdevelopment, and the Bible in Colonial Caribbean Experience in Religion, culture, and tradition in the Caribbean Authors Editors Hemchand Gossai, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell London Palgrave Macmillan.Smith, Philip (2008) Punishment and culture ChicagoUniversity of Chicago Press.Wiltshire-Brodber, Rosina (2002) Gender, Race and crystallise in the Caribbean inGender in Caribbean Development Papers presented at the Inaugural Seminarof the University of the West Indies Women and Development Studies Project Edited by Patricia Mohammed and Catherine ward KingstonCanoe Press UWI