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.