Abstract Summary
Research located at the nexus of medicine, knowledge, and translation deals with some of the fundamentals of human experience: the most basic drive to survive and flourish, and the urge to gather and share information. Living with a constant reminder about the fragility of the human condition, people across all levels of society have sought new information about drugs, curative techniques, and therapeutics, and have devised and debated understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment. The centrality and importance of such knowledge necessitates frequent and urgent modes of knowledge transfer. Translation, from one language, site, material, or context to another plays a crucial role in these epistemic acts. In these two panels, we look at the processes of “articulations” and “disarticulations” in the production of knowledge as we bring into focus the importance of translation by groups and individuals, and of languages and concepts, hitherto marginalised in grand narratives. We look at instances of translations from the medieval to the modern period across geographical locations investigating how “translation” can serve as an analytic in history of science to understand movement across linguistic, practical and sign systems. We also investigate how translation functions as a space of power and/or resistance in relation to gender, race and colonialism. The panels’ diverse set of papers offers a new approach for a global understanding of the history of science across traditional boundaries, and looks to push theories of exchange towards new more complex understanding of movements and intersections.
Self-Designated Keywords :
Premodern World, Translation, Health, the human body
