MESA Banner
Abstract
What can the history of technology contribute to the history of science for the Islamicate context? More importantly, how can the study of the Islamicate occult sciences expand the epistemological and ontological horizons of these globalizing fields, which, despite recent advances, are still relatively narrow? This two-part paper attempts an answer to these questions through both a theoretical and a methodological approach. The history of technology is disproportionately focused on Euro-American spaces and their largely white, male experts. The field has problematically used analytical tools developed in the these contexts to understand the production of knowledge outside of the West. The first part of the paper acts as a brief introduction to the panel, which, as a collective, joins the call of scholars interested in histories of science and technology outside of Euro-American contexts to develop new theoretical and ontological frameworks, and alternative methodological tools to challenge how the field has traditionally conceived of hierarchies of scientific knowledge and notions of a disenchanted, industrial modernity. To do so, it shows how magical objects and superhuman beings were agentive technological conduits that blurred what enviro-tech historians have termed the “illusory boundary” between humans and their worldly environments -- with dramatic implications for the relationship between the material world and the realm of the unseen in Islamicate societies. The second half explores the methodological possibilities of using magical objects as historical sources and the previously occult(ed) ontologies their examination render visible, using as case studies a selection of non-written amulets and talismans acquired by anthropologists and private collectors late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt and Palestine. It investigates a category of magical knowledge known as ‘ilm al-rukka, or the science of old wives -- which primarily utilized magical objects and other non-literate forms of occult knowledge -- to highlight lower-class women, enslaved and free black Africans, and superhuman beings as primary producers of techno-scientific knowledge who have heretofore been rendered invisible in Islamicate occultism studies specifically and global science and technology studies generally.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Islamic World
Ottoman Empire
Palestine
Sudan
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries