Alexander Statman (UCLA), “Canal: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Control of Water"
Duygu Yildirim (University of Tennessee), "Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences"
Discussant: Ahmed Ragab (Johns Hopkins University)
Abstracts:
Canal
Historians have traced roots of Enlightenment environmentalism to the encounter with supposedly conservationist approaches to nature in Asia; this chapter excavates the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge about canals during the eighteenth century in order to
explore a competing vision in which nature was to be remade for human ends. Built in Europe and throughout the Indo-Pacific world, canals are constructed natural things whose purpose is to manage, control, and direct other natural things. Canals put both natural things and
knowledge about them in motion. The French traveler Pierre Poivre admired the irrigation techniques that watered the Mekong Delta, while the statesman Henri Bertin took China’s Grand Canal as a model for French transportation engineering. Their advocacy of an interventionist approach to the natural environment resulted from encounters with Asian contemporaries, including the Sino-Vietnamese prince Mạc Thiên Tứ and the Chinese priest Aloys Kô, as well as efforts to understand their natural knowledge. The Enlightenment discovered not only natural utopias in Asia, but also others that were man-made.
Coffee
What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies that consume it? This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between sense and scientific sensibility in the making of knowledge about coffee. As an iconic beverage of early modern globalization, coffee belied easy categorization. Baffled drinkers of coffee— from naturalists and physicians to merchants—tried to come up with a sufficiently expansive definition of this new and ambiguous plant from the Ottoman lands. Europeans had to rely on their senses, particularly gustatory, while creating an embodied knowledge of coffee. This sensational encounter with the Turkish drink, however, brought new anxieties to occlude the fellow feeling among coffee drinkers across religions, resulting in a differentiation of the innately melancholic Turkish body. Inter-cultural encounters of the senses around coffee thus embodied the tension between alienating the self from the object of inquiry and peering into sensations as an epistemic practice.
Date
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