“People Eaters: Corpse Medicine, Cannibalism, Vampirology, and the Limits of Humanity in the Early Modern World”

Clare Griffin (Nazarbayev University)

Should people eat people? In the early modern world, this was a serious question. Western European medical men recommended the use of various medicines made from human corpses, medicines that were anathematized and banned in the early seventeenth century Russian empire. Those same Western Europeans pathologised the behaviours and devalued the humanity of other peoples in the early modern global world by accusing them of cannibalism. In South Eastern Europe and the Greek Islands, local beliefs held that the returning human dead nourished themselves by feeding on the bodies of the living; such beliefs fascinated Western European learned society, leading to a brief peak in the study of the vampire phenomenon in scientific academies in the early eighteenth century. Often, these phenomena are discussed as to how they divided up humanity, into the eaters, the eaten, and the non-eaters. Yet such discussions also reveal something else: the bodily connection of the eaters and the eaten. Those who sought to denegrate the people eaters focused on the immorality of eating people; they did not question its utility. Indeed, the ideas of both the eaters and the non-eaters seem to coincide on one vital point: there is a special nutrional, medicinal, ritual, religious, or magical value to consuming one’s own kind. People-eating does not divide humanity; rather it is fundamentally based on the unique bodily connections of one human to another.

“Headhunting, Bestiality and Extinction: German Anthropology and the Fight for Philippine Independence (1870-1904)”

Marissa Petrou (New York University)

In the late nineteenth century, the mountain dwelling Philippine peoples known as the Negritos were of much interest to European scholars. Spanish ethnographers viewed the Negritos as a degenerate race and many German physical and cultural anthropologists considered them a transitional race between ape and human. As evidence they cited similarities in skull and skeletal formation as well as reports that the women confessed to fornicating with monkeys. The Negritos were of special interest because of their persistent independence from the Spanish colonial government. Another activity of concern in the study of the Philippines’ independent ethnic communities was headhunting, an activity which scientists sought to explain through physiognomic analysis of its practitioners. Not all anthropologists accepted this evidence or agreed with existing interpretations and thus the study of headhunting and bestiality provides the opportunity to examine debates during the founding years of the anthropological sciences. In 1889 Filipino nationalist and German-trained scientist Jose Rizal invited A. B. Meyer to join the Board of Directors of the International Association of Philippinists. Meyer’s work historicized the material culture and social practices of the many ethnic groups of the Philippines. It was this reading of Meyer’s work as a counter to the dehumanizing scholarship of the Spanish ethnologists which most attracted Filipino anti-colonialists. Through studies of headhunting and bestiality, I consider how scientists evaluated an ethnic group based on their relationships with their human and animal neighbors as a means to assess the community’s future political and biological status.

“Monstrous Specialization: The Machine-Made Mind in Fin-de-Siècle France”

Lily Huang (University of Chicago)

In the Vocabulaire technique et critique de philosophie, laboriously hashed out by France’s leading philosophers and savants from 1900-1922, the word “spécial” receives a curt definition: “Limited, restricted.” In a work that stands out for its lack of consensus—the margins of the Vocabulaire preserve the dissenting opinions of the contributors—the word “spécial” entered the philosophical lexicon with a rare unanimity. But why is this word even here, in a technical and critical vocabulary? This paper examines the social and epistemological developments that made a seemingly unremarkable word into a term of derision in the late nineteenth century in France. “Spécial” bore the anxieties over both the specialization of knowledge and the specialization of skills for industrial work. An undisputed narrative of the history of science and social science of this period has traced the process of increasing specialization and professionalization. Less often told within this narrative are stories of the resistance to that transformation. In France, however, alongside the expansion of education programs outside of the university system and the formation of disciplines in the research university, there emerged a fear of the kind of intellect these changes could produce: limited, restricted, and—perhaps most improbably to us—mechanical, rote. For what made specialization undesirable was its association with machinery— “specialized” in the sense of fitted to a single function. This paper shows how philosophers, savants, and educators marshalled a set of human ideals against the spectre of the specialist: finesse, breadth of knowledge, and supple adaptability.

“Spinning Silk into Sutures: The Decline of Japanese Raw Silk Exports and the Development of Silk as a Biomedical Material in the Twentieth Century”

Lisa Onaga (Nanyang Technical University)

While the history of silk textiles is ancient and has attracted the interests of many scholars, alternative purposes of silk, such as surgical sutures, have received far less attention. Re-examining silk and silkworm as proteins can illuminate the historical paths that have produced what seem like alternative uses of silk as biocompatible medicines and tools. Viewing protein as an analytic category offers a way to translate narratives centered around the historical fabrication of silk and textiles into the realm of medicine. Applying the lens of proteins especially facilitates the examination of silk as a biomaterial, a material synthesized from a biological entity with properties of that original lifeform. The attention to biomateriality encourages a translational stance that brings the importance of tactile materiality to the critical fore. In this case, proteinaceous expressions represent the translational product of the silkworm genome and the silkworm’s interaction with the mulberry plant. Historical cognizance of how biomateriality guides biomedical and engineering research on the molecular structure of silk sheds light on how silk has been translated into macro-level constructions in medicine. Thinking with the protein enables a recognition of the importance of silk in the history of medicine. The history of a biomaterial that holds wounds together and heals scars illuminates a strategy for understanding the emergent history of biomedical silk innovations. By interrogating how non-absorbent silk sutures became massproduced by Japanese textile companies and used within the body it is possible to comprehend how silk has gained new value as biocompatible protein.