To see, to feel, to know: Historical perspectives on embodied knowledge(s)
WHEN & WHERE?
3 May 2024, 9:45–17:45, University of Helsinki
PROGRAMME FOR THE EVENT
9:30 Coffee
9:50 Welcome
10:00-12:00 Session 1
Kalle Kananoja (University of Oulu) – Embodied Knowledge and the Reception of Popular Health Guides in Finland, 1890s–1970
Edna Huotari (University of Helsinki) – Ignored Experiments: The Absence of Early Medical Electricity (1790-1819) in Relation to Electroconvulsive Therapy
Elad Carmel (University of Jyväskylä) – Deism and Anticlerical Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Sini Mikkola (University of Eastern Finland) – “[…] non quod carnem meam aut sexum meum non sentiam”: Gendered Body and Martin Luther’s Embodied Knowledge
12:00-13:30 Lunch break
13:30-15:30 Session 2
Anton Runesson (University of Stockholm) – A Phenomenology of Torture in Mid-18th Century Sweden
Annika Raapke (University of Helsinki) – The Hand That Cuts The Bread: Some Thoughts on 18th-Century Swedish Bodies Encountering Medical Electricity
Stefan Schröder (University of Helsinki) – Always Be Honest and Don’t Get Fooled! Applying And Evaluating Medical Electricity in The Mid-18th Century
Eva Johanna Holmberg (University of Helsinki) – Coloniality, Embodied Knowledge and Suffering in early Jamestown, c. 1607-1620
15:30-16:15 Coffee break
16:15-17:45 Keynote
Professor Karen Harvey (University of Birmingham) – From the Inside Out: Social Embodiment and Lay Knowledge in eighteenth-century British Letters
Chair Soile Ylivuori (University of Helsinki)
17:45-18:45 Wine and nibbles
WORKSHOP IN A NUTSHELL
Our ELBOW-project is launching a series of three workshops to map out the interactions between bodies, experiences, and knowledge construction. This will be the first of these workshops, and it seeks to map out the two-way interactions between embodiment and knowledge construction. The keynote speaker of the event is Professor Karen Harvey, University of Birmingham.
ABOUT THE KEYNOTE
Professor Karen Harvey: From the Inside Out: Social Embodiment and Lay Knowledge in eighteenth-century British Letters
This paper explores eighteenth-century British men and women’s reports of their everyday embodied experiences in familiar letters (those exchanged between family and friends). It begins with a discussion of ‘embodiment’ and its relationship to knowledge, defining embodiment as the product of an interaction between the physical body and different forms of knowledge. The paper treats aspects of the accounts of the body in these letters as a form of ‘lay’ knowledge, exploring how experiences of the physical body were shaped by this lay knowledge, and (in turn) how this lay knowledge was shaped by the physical body. It also shows that medical knowledge was of little significance in shaping eighteenth-century embodiment as evidenced in these letters.
The paper also attends to how the form of the letter shaped embodiment. Letters both documented and served as a primary tool to enable the mediation between highly personal, individual physical experiences and collective lay knowledge about the body. The sympathetic aspects of letter writing generated an environment that demanded people’s reports of their physical experiences and accommodated understandings of highly individualized bodies. Yet personal reflection on physical experiences took place within the relational and social practice of letter exchange: particular lexicons (confessional or familial, for example) influenced people’s embodied experiences. Finally, within the distinct lay vision of the body, as well as at times where people describe not knowing their body, we can observe the role of the physical body itself in shaping knowledge and embodiment.
Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this, she was Professor of Cultural History at the University of Sheffield. Karen has published extensively on the history of gender, masculinity, sexuality, the home and material culture. Her books include Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) and the edited collection History and Material Culture, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2018). Her last single-authored book was The Imposteress Rabbit-Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2020), a microhistory of the well-known rabbit-birth hoax.
In 2023 she published the coedited Letters and the Body, 1700-1830: Writing and Embodiment (Routledge) with Sarah Goldsmith and Sheryllynne Haggerty) and in 2024 published the co-edited and open access The Material Body: Embodiment, history and archaeology in industrialising England, 1700-1850 (Manchester University Press) with Elizabeth Craig-Atkins. She is currently writing the book from the Leverhulme Trust-funded project, ‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680-1820’. One output of this project is a publicly available and searchable database of eighteenth-century letters (an edition is already online).
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Humanities have recently witnessed a cross-disciplinary ‘bodily turn’ which has increasingly focused on the connections between embodiment, cognition, and knowledge. The influential notion of embodied knowledge has been used to describe both tacit knowledge that resides in the body as well as different forms of knowledge gained through the body (e.g. Grosz, Young). Historians have claimed a prominent place in these investigations, as histories of the body, experiences, and senses have crossed paths with cultural history and history of science in mapping how knowledge of the world has been rooted in the body at different times and places (e.g. Boddice, Dietz & Dupré, Seth, Sibum).
Our ERC-funded project Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c. 1740–1840 (ELBOW, 2022–2027) investigates these questions in the context of one of the most fashionable and wonderous experimental therapies of the eighteenth century—namely, medical electricity.
As an integral part of the project, we are launching a series of three workshops to map out the interactions between bodies, experiences, and knowledge construction in the long eighteenth century, with a special focus on the intersectional power dynamics surrounding the formation of scientific knowledge.
Intentionally broad in its scope, the first workshop seeks to map out the two-way interactions between embodiment and knowledge construction. The concept of knowledge here should be interpreted to mean anything from social, cultural, and religious scripts to medical, technological, and/or scientific knowledge.
We are particularly interested in forms of practical knowledge and everyday life; as Peter Burke has pointed out, ‘we know more than we can tell’, as skills ranging from riding a bike to diagnosing illness or tasting wine are forms of (in part) practical knowledge, difficult to put into words. Pierre Bourdieu has employed the concept of habitus to describe the embodied construction, application, and performance of knowledges. Then again, we are also enthusiastic about scientific knowledge as deeply situated: constructed within a material and social setting and through observations of individual bodies and their embodied experiences—as indeed in the case of medical knowledge.
The aim of the workshop is, then, to shed light on how knowledge and embodiment have interacted in different historical, cultural, and social moments and spaces. How did tacit, embodied knowledge relate to empirical scientific knowledge in different historical ages? How did existing cultural scripts, religious dogmas, or scientific worldviews shape embodied knowledge on a practical, individual, experienced level? What sort of (intersectional) power structures influenced whose embodied knowledge was deemed important, trustworthy, appropriate, or scientifically valid? In short: how has bodily experience become knowledge, and how has knowledge become embodied?
References for the workshop description
Boddice, Rob, The History of Emotions (Manchester UP, 2018)
Burke, Peter, What is the History of Knowledge? (Polity, 2016)
Dietz, Feike & Sven Dupré, ‘Youthful minds and hands: Learning practical knowledge in early modern Europe’, Science in Context 32:2 (2019), 113–18
Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indiana UP, 1994)
Seth, Suman, ‘Colonial History and Postcolonial Science Studies’, Radical History Review 127:1 (2017), 63–85
Sibum, H. Otto, ‘Science and the Knowing Body: making Sense of Embodied Knowledge in Scientific Experiment’, in Sven Dupré et al. (eds), Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Amsterdam UP, 2020), 257–94
Young, Iris Marion, On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays (Oxford UP, 2005)
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