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This article examines the place of the body in psychiatric internment in a colonial context. By adopting a micro-historical approach through the study of four “cases” interned between 1921 and 1936 at the Anjanamasina asylum, the only psychiatric institution in Madagascar and one of the most important in the French colonial empire, we show that the body, as captured by the psychiatric gaze, is not only a medium of essentialization, but also a space of expression in which modes of sensitivity are revealed, constituting traces of the transformations in the relationship to the self in the Malagasy colonial situation.