University of Heidelberg

Concept

The topic of this year’s Annual Conference is "Frontiers of Knowledge: Health, Environment and the History of Science". The conference is organized by the Cluster‘s Research Area C "Health and Environment" and presents research results of Cluster members in collaboration with renowned scholars from around the globe. Together they will examine and discuss transcultural issues in these fields transgressing the conventional intellectual divisions between Asia and Europe.

The conference features two keynote lectures which will highlight this year’s topic and kick-start the discussion.
In his lecture on Property, Rights, and the Constitution of Contemporary Indian Biomedicine: Notes from the Gleevec Case, Prof. Kaushik Sunder Rajan (University of Chicago) will be tracing how intellectual property regimes drive the re-institutionalization of pharmaceutical development in India today in unsettled and contested ways.
Prof. Janet Hunter (London School of Economics) will focus on how markets function in the immediate aftermath of major disasters in her lecture The Markets have Collapsed into Complete Confusion: Market Operation after the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923.

Four major panel sessions (podium discussions) underscore the theme of the conference and will extend the discussion on transcultural flows and how we have conceived and are conceiving knowledge in the past and present. Nine further afternoon panels will showcase the research being conducted at the Cluster. The podium discussions will cover the following four topics.

Ancient Medicine (Joachim Friedrich Quack)
Already in ancient times, knowledge of healing systems passed rather freely between different cultures. The second millennium BCE already sees official exchanges of specialists between the courts of the great kings, and this only intensifies in the first millennium, when it is sometimes attested how specialists from different backgrounds were rivaling with each other for the favor of their high-level clients, e.g. Egyptian and Greek doctors at the court of the great king of Persia. Besides the high-level contacts, we also have to reckon with itinerant practitioners seeking their fortune on their own. Furthermore, special drugs were linked with long-distant travel, like pepper which comes from south-east Asia and is actually attested in medical texts from Roman-period Egypt. Traces of intense movement of persons, objects and ideas can be found in specific concepts of the body and health as well as in drugs and measurement systems used.

Circulation and Changing Conceptions of Knowledge (Joachim Kurtz)
Recent work in the history of science and thought has significantly enriched our understanding of the diverse ways in which knowledge is produced, shared, and appropriated in cultural encounters. Rejecting simplistic diffusionism and undermining triumphalist accounts of the inevitable spread of modern rationality, detailed case studies have revealed the complex interplay of institutional settings, power structures, ideological environments, scholarly practices, and individual agency in transforming knowledge on the move in a broad variety of disciplinary contexts. Focusing on three examplary episodes from the history of science and medicine in East and South Asia, our discussion is designed to supplement these studies in two ways: on the one hand, we will explore the role and uses of visualization in studying circulations of knowledge; on the other, we will examine how conceptions of knowledge itself – views of its nature and ontological status as well as its sources, functions, uses, and history – have been reshaped in transcultural interactions.

Seascapes and Shipping (Harald Fuess)
Most of the surface of the earth is covered by oceans but historians have generally focused on land history and neglected the water part of our natural environment since it is not a major site of human habitation and thus seems somewhat marginal to the analysis of larger historical developments. Moreover, the high sea may be dominated by particular seafaring nations but it is usually not treated as an extension of a national territory and does not figure prominently in the narrative of building the modern nation state. Nevertheless the late nineteenth century saw multiple breakthrough in thinking and technology that altered human perceptions and naval practices from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s work on the influence of sea power fuelling the Anglo-German and East Asian naval arms races to the prevalent spread of steam power and the ever-larger construction of steel ships for military and commercial usage. The panel addresses key changes in late nineteenth century shipping through three case studies emphasizing the transcultural nature of the lives of ships, life on board of ships and the interaction between ships, both feared and desired.

Travelling Technologies, Tracing Transculturality: Paradigm Shifts in Science, Medicine and Society (William Sax)
The last few decades have seen a proliferation of new technologies that has driven the field of medicine in directions that would otherwise have been unimaginable. Taking cue from Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s arguments in his work Biocapital: The Constitution of a Postgenomic Life, it will be the explicit aim of this panel to evaluate the epistemic shifts that are occurring within the “techno-scientific regimes” that we witness today. These epistemic shifts reorganise the world in new ways that allow for the circulation of ideas, objects and persons through intricate transcultural networks. With the help of the various papers that will be presented at this panel, we attempt to not just trace the itineraries of medical technologies through these networks of circulation but also put forward a commentary about how the world itself is being articulated through a new epistemic, economic and moral vocabulary.