ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A Mongolian Anatomical Translation of a Manchu Text: the Making of Early Modern Cultural Knowledge

• In Event: Translating Technologies and Images: a Context for Textual Knowledge-Making across Early Modern Cultural Spheres

English Abstract

This paper focuses on a Mongolian-language anatomical text that was produced at the end of China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1912), but with a title that evoked The Manchu Anatomy, an early-eighteenth-century imperial medical text which had been commissioned at the height of empire. This paper argues that the Mongolian ‘translation’ of the Manchu text in question was in fact the remaking of a text within a resonant cultural sphere, evoking both the cultural and medical forms, as well as the context of the earlier political order. In doing so, the paper points to the very pluralistic understanding of medicine at the end of the Qing dynasty China. Moreover, it shows the multiple cultural and epistemological contexts that individuals drew on and mobilized when confronted with the change of the political order and the rise of biomedicine in the early twentieth century. In inverting the hierarchies between knowledge of texts, and knowledge from the visual, material, and technological realms, this paper argues that this form of translation valued more abstract ideas of creating resonance, rather than providing very clear definitions or precision in the making of a text. The paper also provides an example of how more fluid and pluralistic early modern practices of knowledge-making through translation persisted beyond strict temporal frames.

Author

• Sare Aricanli, Durham University