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Rituals of Madness in the Practices of Place

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Abstract

While completing a PhD in literature with a focus on the practices of physical and linguistic spaces, I was also working and sleeping (on call) at a dilapidated house in a poorer part of Bristol in case I was needed by one of five paranoid or clinically psychotic residents. I gave out medication in the morning, then went home to study in a small rented room. I began to see ritual everywhere - in my professors' routines; my own habits; the behaviours of the mentally ill patients. This paper is the story of a number of madnesses and the problems with reading ritual performance in everything we do.

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Hawkes, J. Rituals of Madness in the Practices of Place. J Med Humanit 37, 95–109 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9300-x

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