Fw: H-ASIA: Talk on Garden Automata & Wonder Across the Indian Ocean

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Field" <adfield@BU.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2013 8:59 AM
Subject: H-ASIA: Talk on Garden Automata & Wonder Across the Indian Ocean


H-ASIA
Jan 26 2013

Talk on Garden Automata & Wonder Across the Indian Ocean
********************************************************
From: Projit B. Mukharji <pulu.mukharji@googlemail.com>

Dear Editor and colleagues,

The History & Sociology of Science dept. at the University of Pennsylvania
are hosting the following talk that might be of interest to Asianists.

*"Garden Automata and the Production of Wonder Across the Indian Ocean"*

By: Daud Ali, University of Pennsylvania


Abstract*:* This paper explores the circulation of technological practices
pertaining to automata between the Eastern Mediterranean and South Asia at
the turn of the first millennium CE. By the tenth century, automata,
particularly those in garden contexts, formed an important part of a newly
emergent cosmopolitan world of objects which created wonder among men as
geographically dispersed as the Ottonian Bishop Luit Prand of Cremona and
the contemporaneous west Indian savant Somadevasuri, writing under a
satellite of the mighty Rastrakuta court. At the center of this world stood
the Abbasid court, from where the greatest interest and most intimate
knowledge regarding these devices was produced. Looking at these devices
from the periphery of this world, from the Western coastal regions of the
South Asian Subcontinent, this paper will explore several questions
regarding the transmission and reception of these automata as a both
technological and cultural practice—how was knowledge of these machines
transmitted between and within specific cultural contexts?; how should we
best understand the domestic and garden environments which seem to have
inevitably formed places where these machines functioned?; and relatedly,
in a world without the supposed disenchantment of the modern, where far
more miraculous beings and events were not unknown, why did these machines
elicit such a particular fascination?


*Date: * 02/04/2013

*Time: * 03:30 pm - 05:30 pm

*Location: * 337 Cohen Hall


In case you are interested and in the area, do please join us.



Best wishes,

Projit B Mukharji

--
Projit B Mukharji, PhD.
Martin Meyerson Asst. Prof. in Interdisciplinary Studies,
History & Sociology of Science/
South Asian Studies Centre.
University of Pennsylvania.

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