Cross-Cultural Interactions across Time: Imperial Entanglements and the Makings of Natural, Medical, and Cultural Knowledge from the Early Modern to the Modern Period

This panel explores how dynamics of cross-cultural interactions changed from the early modern to the modern period and how such dynamics influenced the formation and interpretation of natural, medical, and cultural knowledge in different imperial contexts. Organized chronologically, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, these papers examine imperial entanglements in different parts of Asia, Europe and North Africa, and highlight the ever changing role of cultural mediation in negotiating differences between medical traditions, recipes, rituals of healing, and institutional spaces. Addressing modes of collaboration as well as coercion, these papers speak to novel methodologies for understanding a range of historical realities from the perspective of different actors. They engage with early modern experiences of collecting, interpreting, and using nature; European and indigenous encounters through texts and markets; modern manifestations of multi-lingual rituals of healing; animal-human relations in sacred time; and collected objects in modern institutions mediating the past, present, and future. Comparatively, these papers ask how different approaches to and definitions of the “cross-cultural” fare against the test of time along a global scale.