ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collecting bezoars across Indo-Pacific worlds, c.1700: Judgment, authority, and contested knowledge

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 3

English Abstract

In early modernity, bezoars were rare and unstable objects highly coveted for their healing and magical powers. Their value and contentious nature provoked disputes over authenticity, trust, and authority. As bezoars moved through increasingly global networks, different agents strove to assert epistemic control over what counted as a “true” stone. The works of the Jesuit pharmacist Georg Joseph Kamel, stationed in the Spanish Philippines, unveil how collecting and judgment operated within these contested hierarchies of knowledge. In Manila, Kamel was confronted by a wide array of objects traded across Indo-Pacific worlds that could pass as bezoars. To create order out of this chaos, he assembled a collection of specimens that served him simultaneously as an epistemic resource, a marker of status, and a form of capital. This collection enabled Kamel to practice expert judgment on individual specimens and thus emerge as an arbiter of the authenticity of bezoars and a flourishing trans-imperial broker. Yet ultimately, Kamel’s authority drew on the knowledge and specimens gathered from local, largely non-European informants whose own judgments he displaced. This paper examines how such hierarchies of expertise allowed Europeans to claim the capacity to judge while relying on the labor and knowledge of others. Kamel’s collecting and classificatory practices thus unveil the epistemological entanglements and frictions that shaped trans-cultural knowledge-making across Indo-Pacific worlds.

Author

• Sebestian Kroupa, McGill University