11 October 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Christine Folch (Duke University)

“Re/Encountering Yerba Mate: Power, Plant Knowledges and the Americas’ Ilex Fix”

Though perhaps lesser-known than tea or coffee, yerba mate is the third most popular caffeinated infusion in the world and its introduction to Iberian explorers fundamentally shaped the development of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in South America. Made from the leaves and tender shoots of the South American holly Ilex paraguariensis, yerba mate has been consumed in the heart of the continent since time immemorial and immediately captured the attention (culinary and pecuniary) of European colonists. All three bitter drinks came into European orbit at around the same time in the 16th century. So, why don’t we drink yerba mate in North America?

Moreover, why don’t Texans commonly drink yaupon, yerba mate’s Ilex stimulant cousin that grows abundantly throughout the state and whose contact with European palates pre-dates yerba mate?

By counterpointing yerba mate and yaupon production and consumption as they change over time and place, from precolonial Indigenous beginnings to the present, this talk explores the processes of commodification and their countervailing forces to show how accidents of botany intersect with political economic systems and personal taste. The story is also one of pharmacological priorities and the creation and transmission of plant knowledges and ignorances. Folch uncovers how market structures and the social meanings of goods influence one another to argue, via the case of the Americas’ Ilex beverages, for the contingency and tentativeness of modern capitalism.

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Christine Folch is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Environmental Sciences and Policy at Duke University. She is the author of Hydropolitics: The Itaipu Dam, Sovereignty, and the Engineering of Modern South America (Princeton University Press, 2019).

 

 

27 September 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 1.102

Pratik Chakrabarti (University of Houston)

“The Naked Pharaohs: Decolonizing the History of Science”

This talk investigates the history of the use of mummies in scientific research. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, mummies from Egypt, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands were unwrapped, dissected, and subjected to various forms of scientific examination. These practices have persisted into contemporary bioarchaeological and genetic research. Mummies have held significant value in scientific inquiry due to their unique preservation, which has rendered them as anatomical specimens from deep history. Consequently, they have been dismembered and analyzed in highly invasive ways, combining modern surgical techniques with geological extraction methods. The talk argues that the physical repatriation of these objects remains incomplete without their intellectual reevaluation. It posits that decolonization is not merely an objective but also a methodological approach. The publications reviewed in this study have been in the public domain for over a century, and the mummies that have been dissected are exhibited in museums. This talk employs the concept of decolonization to shift the perspectives through which mummies are viewed. To achieve this, it critically examines the various historical and contemporary scientific practices associated with mummies, demonstrating that as mummies became objects of scientific study, their unwrapping and dissection became central to the discourse on their preservation.

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Pratik Chakrabarti is the National Endowment for the Humanities-Cullen Chair in History and  Medicine at the University of Houston and director of the project on “Health is Politics” https://uh.edu/class/history/about/project-on-health-is-politics/.  His most recent book,  Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), was awarded the Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science in 2022.