(Note: A recording of this talk is now available here.)
Join ARCE for a virtual public talk on “The Curse of the Black Eggplant: Reconstructing Occult Economies in Late Ottoman Egypt” by Taylor M. Moore of the University of California Santa Barbara.
Moore is a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a CAORC Multi-Country Research Fellow. Her research lies at the intersections of critical race studies, decolonial/postcolonial histories of science, and decolonial materiality studies. Her manuscript-in-preparation, Superstitious Women: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt, uses modern Egyptian amulets as an archive to reconstruct the magical and vernacular medical life-worlds of peasant women healers, and their critical role developing medico-anthropological expertise in Egypt from 1880-1950. Taylor’s work is invested in illuminating the occult(ed) networks, economies, and actors whose bodies and labor are generally rendered invisible in Eurocentric histories of global science.
In this talk, Moore uses the “amulet tale” of the black eggplant as a frame to reveal the occult economies that were a robust—if not integral—part of Egypt’s economic market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She reconstructs these rich constellations of occult workers and occult objects by placing the women practitioners and their customers who consumed these objects at their center.
October 31, 2020 at 1:00pm EST
Please register in advance: https://www.arce.org/curse-black-eggplant-reconstructing-occult-economies-late-ottoman-egypt
The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) is a member center of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). ARCE actively supports scholarship, training and conservation efforts in Egypt through grants, fieldwork and field schools.