Event

May 2-4, 2016
Sacred Cures: Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia

Address

Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany

Contact and Registration

For registration please contact Chaonan Zhang
For other questions please contact Michael Stanley-Baker

Image: Detail of The Blue Beryl, By Desi Sangye Gyatso, Catalog #70.3/5470 Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

Image: Detail of The Blue Beryl, By Desi Sangye Gyatso, Catalog #70.3/5470 Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

Summary

This workshop brings together specialists in East, South, and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas who work on the intersection of religion and medicine. We wish to examine what work has been done by the terms medicine/religion, or related binaries such as medicine/healing or classical/vernacular? What is clarified or distorted when these categories are mapped onto other languages, periods and regions? We will explore commonalities across regions and across time, working from the classical to the contemporary. How do scholars and cultural actors alike produce “medicine” and “religion” as fields? Taking stock of recent gains in the field, we will also discuss remaining areas for study, and compare and refine the tools and terms that might be used in that endeavour.

Participants have been invited to addressing the following areas:
1. Historiography: how the religion/medicine question has been framed by different academic communities.
2. Materials: what primary sources or archives are available for the given historical periods and/or cultural contexts, and how these afford different kinds of analysis of the question.
3. Means: what moments, encounters, processes, practices, and relationships produce or reveal significant (re)structurings of medicine and religion.
 

  • Speakers Include
  • Pre-Modern
    • Donald Harper, Vivienne Lo, Katja Triplett, Michael Slouber, Tu Aming & Joey Hung
  • Early Modern
    • Projit Mukharji, Katharina Saberning, Leslie DeVries, Angelika Messner
  • Modern/Contemporary
    • Helen Lambert, Celine Coderey, Elisabeth Hsu, Geoffrey Samuels, Mona Schrempf
  • With closing remarks by
    • Judith Farquhar


Papers will be pre-circulated, and no presentations will be made in the workshop in order to maximize discussion. We welcome you to attend, but please register with Chaonan Zhang (czhang@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) to be sent the papers when they are prepared.

You can dowload the abstracts via the download section.

 

2016-05-02T09:30:00SAVE IN I-CAL 2016-05-02 09:30:00 2016-05-04 16:30:00 Sacred Cures: Situating Medicine and Religion in Asia Pierce SalgueroMichael Stanley-Baker Pierce SalgueroMichael Stanley-Baker Europe/Berlin public