Visiting Lecturer: Dr. Carla Nappi: Manchu Chinese Medicine in the Early Modern World

Based in a larger project devoted to exploring the Manchu language as a medium for translating bodily knowledge in the early modern world, this talk will treat The Manchu Anatomy, an early eighteenth century Manchu text on bodies penned by Jesuits at the Qing Kangxi court, as a site for fieldwork in re-conceptualizing the body as a technology for producing relationships in space and time. We will read the text not as a collection of arms and legs and mouths, but instead as an archive of the kinds of relations of proximity that create material experience: on-ness, with-ness, through-ness, and other kinds of prepositional relations. The talk will suggest that all bodies are bodies in translation, and will offer a model for reading documents from the history of health and medicine in a way that opens up new ways of telling stories with them.