Between Loss and Recovery: Cross-Confessional Health Culture in Ottoman Bosnia
April 14, 10 – 11 AM PT
An online talk by:
Dr. Amila Buturović
York University Department of Humanities
THIS TALK HAS BEEN CANCELED.
The talk will be rescheduled for Winter Term 1 (Sept-Oct) 2021, and we will inform you about the new schedule in due time.
[ Abstract ]
This study focuses on medical pluralism in Ottoman Bosnia through its confessional differences, medical theories, and curative practices. Given that medical knowledge circulated inter-regionally, between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as intra-regionally, among Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews, the study sheds light on how premodern Bosnians negotiated their lives between local and trans-local values and systems of knowledge. A broader aim is to recalibrate the understanding of this historical period by focusing on the examples of cultural intimacy and cross-confessional dynamics drawn along the ideas and practices of healing. Primary sources include material and non-material culture, written multi-lingual sources that include treatises on medicine and religious healing; talismanic texts and amulets; herbalist and pharmaceutical manuals; and archival records that reflect the interactive and cross-confessional spirit of healing in Ottoman Bosnia. Steeped in the region’s cultural history, the study also seeks to counteract the current political climate that systematically endangers cultural intimacy through ethnic divisions, exclusivist discourse, and the legacy of the 1992-1995 genocide. Turning to a premodern past is not only a process of writing history but an act of rewriting the past and the recovery of memory which the present has targeted for destruction.
[ Info ]
This event is co-sponsored with the UBC Interdisciplinary Histories Research Excellence Cluster. To RSVP, please visit their event page.
