The Yoga of the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati: Haṭhayoga on the Cusp of Modernity

The Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati is a Sanskrit text on the practice of Haṭhayoga, probably composed in the eighteenth century in Maharashtra. This article discusses, among other things, the dating, authorship, sectarian affiliation, and unique features of the text, its relationship to other yoga texts, and its significance for the history of modern yoga. The most remarkable feature of this text is its section on āsana (yogic posture), which contains six groups of postures, many of which are unusual or unique among yoga texts. Another unique feature of this section is that the postures appear to be arranged into sequences intended to be practised in order. A manuscript of the text exists in the Mysore Palace; this (possibly along with other texts) was the basis for the illustrated āsana descriptions in Mysore’s famous book, the Śrītattvanidhi. As we discuss, it is highly likely that the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati was known to the most influential teacher of ‘modern postural yoga,’ T. Krishnamacharya, and therefore has a special significance for certain schools of transnational yoga

The Abode of Water: Shipwreck Evidence and the Maritime Circulation of Medicine Between Iran and China in the 9th Through 14th Centuries

This dissertation traces the role of Persian travelers and physicians in the maritime exchange of medical goods and knowledge between Iran and China between the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, and the afterlife of that exchange in modern museums. The Maritime Silk Road was a cosmopolitan network of premodern trade arteries linking the Far East and Southeast Asia to the Middle East by sea. The long-standing cultural and economic exchange across these thoroughfares dramatically expanded the pharmaceutical ingredients and medicinal recipes available to physicians practicing across the littorals of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea and facilitated the intellectual engagement of scholars with medical theories from afar. Drawing from an archive of shipwreck artifacts that includes medical goods, herbs, trade wares, and the personal effects of seafarers interpreted alongside written accounts of sea travel, medical and philosophical texts, tomb inscriptions, and architecture in port cities, this dissertation explores how the maritime journey of Persian travelers to China influenced the epistemology and practice of Persian medicine. The first chapter addresses the current state of Southeast Asian shipwreck archaeology and traces the trajectories of medical, scientific, and related shipwreck and navigational artifacts within Western museum collections. Chapter two introduces the historical context in which Persian merchants moved in Middle Period China and initiates a discussion of hybridity and resilience. The burning and reconstruction of the Hangzhou Phoenix mosque provides the narrative frame in which repeated outbreaks of violence in Tang and Song port cities are discussed as an analog to theories of the body and disease. Migration, hybridization, and medical collecting are examined as social and medical practices of resilience. The chapter uses archaeological evidence from port cities and the Belitung shipwreck with a narrative account of the massacre of foreign merchants in Guangzhou to situate the early maritime migration of Persian merchants to China within the changing tides of the Tang and Song periods. The third chapter analyzes the maritime trade routes as sites of spiritual and physical risk, humoral vulnerability, and initiation by examining Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Islamic cosmologies of water and migration evident in religious rituals, medical instructions for seafarers, and the personal effects and crew supplies recovered from the Belitung, Intan, Java Sea, and Pulau Buaya wrecks. These materials are interpreted in light of reflections on the maritime life by travelers who survived the journey to China, leaving behind a ninth-century artistic depiction of a shipwreck, a narrative account, and inscriptions on the tombstones of merchants. Chapter four analyzes the medicines and medical material culture recovered from the Beliting, Java Sea, Intan, Pulau Buaya, and Quanzhou wreck sites within the framework of Persian humoral medicine. The final chapter examines the Tansūqnāma, a fourteenth-century Persian translation of Chinese medical texts, in light of the longue durée of medical exchange between China and Iran and changes to social hierarchies throughout the Mongol Empire that drastically changed the position of Persian merchants in China.PHDAnthropology and HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163150/1/arespess_1.pd

Yogis, Ayurveda, and Kayakalpa: The Rejuvenation of Pandit Malaviya

How should we read claims about health and well-being which defy common sense? Are claims of extreme longevity to be viewed as fraudulent, or as pushing the boundaries of possibility for the human body? This article will consider the narrative and context around a particularly well-publicized incident of rejuvenation therapy, advertised as kāyakalpa (body transformation or rejuvenation), from 1938. In this year, the prominent Congress Activist and co-founder of Banaras Hindu University, Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946), underwent an extreme – and very public – rejuvenation treatment under the care of a sadhu using the name of Shriman Tapasviji (c.1770?-1955). The first half of the article will explore the presentation of Malaviya’s treatment and how it inspired a focus on rejuvenation therapy within Indian medicine in the years immediately following. Exploring this mid-twentieth century incident highlight some of the themes and concerns of the historical period, just out of living memory, but in many ways similar to our own

What’s Hiding in the Spine? A Study of Adhesives in Medieval Books Using Mass Spectrometry

Glues, and in particular glued spines, are notable features of late medieval European books, yet little research has been done into how they were sourced, produced, and used. In this article we present preliminary results from using the paleoproteomic methods of Electromagnetic Zooarchaeology through Mass Spectrometry (eZooMS) and Peptide Mass Fingerprinting (PMF) to identify the source species for animal glues used in late medieval books. We first introduce readers to the principal kinds of glue used in medieval craftsmanship and what is known about their use in bookbinding, principally from the discipline of book conservation. We describe the micro-sampling methods of eZooMS, in which a PVC eraser is rubbed gently on the surface of the book. We then describe the process through which we tested and fine-tuned our sampling methods on eight medieval books held in Canadian repositories, addressing some of the challenges we faced, potential further uses or expansions upon the technique, and the benefits of our collaborative approach to such “manuscientific” studies

No Escape from the Technosystem?

The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth review of Andrew Feenberg’s Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). To this end, the analysis is divided into two parts. The first part gives an overview of its thematic structure and elucidates its key arguments. The second part discusses its most controversial aspects and grapples with its principal weaknesses and limitations. By way of conclusion, the article argues that Feenberg’s book demonstrates the pivotal role that the technosystem plays in shaping contemporary society

Disability, Desire, and the Lyric in Seventeenth-Century France

This thesis asks whether seventeenth-century French lyric poets’ depiction of disability challenges entrenched ideals of beauty, gender, sexuality, and form. It contends that by interrogating the rich and varied imagery of disability found in lyric verse, we deepen our understanding of how French writers and readers of this century interpreted desire and the human body. The primary corpus comprises unpublished manuscripts and printed sources, grouping lyrics thematically rather than by author. This approach treats the poems as a heterogenous collective, enabling a discussion of lesser-known, unpublished, and anonymous poets. Named poets in this corpus include Paul Scarron, Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, Anne de Rohan-Soubise, Charles Vion d’Alibray, François Maynard, and Théophile de Viau. Some poets write about their personal experiences of disability, while others portray disabled protagonists or draw upon imagery of disability in their verse. This thesis puts their lyrics into dialogue with several theoretical approaches to disability through a Critical Disability Studies framework. The chapters deal with crip theory, metaphor theory, the grotesque and carnivalesque, spatial theory, queer theory, transhumanism, and posthumanism. The poets’ negotiation of bodily regimes holds much in common with their concurrent negotiation of the formal constraints of lyric verse, allowing this thesis to ask why poetry – and the seventeenth-century lyric in particular – is so replete with imagery of disability. Due to its examination of the intersections between disability, gender, and sexuality, this thesis will be of interest to scholars of gender and sexuality as well as those studying disability and early modern French literature. Seventeenth-century authors working under a different set of bodily regimes were more likely to imagine disability in ways unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers, so this research also questions current assumptions about what disability is and is not, while nuancing existing theoretical frameworks used to read disability in literature

Hoofprints in the sand:A study on domestic sheep (Ovis aries) from Iron Age southern Phoenicia using traditional biometric methods

The majority of research to date on the translocation of livestock in the premodern (before 1500 CE) Mediterranean Basin has focused on expansive movements out from geographic origins of domestication or from colonizer-to-colonized territories. Fewer zooarchaeological studies have investigated the lateral trajectories of distinct varieties of domesticated animals around the post-Neolithic eastern Mediterranean, partially due to the difficulty in detecting intra-species variation osteologically. The research conducted in the present study sought to improve understanding of the human-mediated mobility of domestic sheep (Ovis aries) from Iron Age settlements in the southern Levant. Variability in body size and a greater variety of morphotypes were expected from coastal flocks in southern Phoenicia in comparison to inland herds, possibly due to the dynamic influence of maritime trade. Biometric data analysis of zooarchaeological materials using log size index and astragalar dimension index methods revealed evidence for the possible optimization of coastal sheep for wool production and a potential introduction event in the Persian period. The Aegean region could be a source for this introduction; however, further research is needed to specify the geographic origin of this phenomenon.</p

Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation

This innovative collection showcases the importance of the relationship between translation and experience in premodern science, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to offer a nuanced understanding of knowledge transfer across premodern time and space. The volume considers experience as a tool and object of science in the premodern world, using this idea as a jumping-off point from which to view translation as a process of interaction between diff erent epistemic domains. The book is structured around four dimensions of translation—between terms within and across languages; across sciences and scientific norms; between verbal and visual systems; and through the expertise of practitioners and translators—which raise key questions on what constituted experience of the natural world in the premodern area and the impact of translation processes and agents in shaping experience. Providing a wide-ranging global account of historical studies on the travel and translation of experience in the premodern world, this book will be of interest to scholars in history, the history of translation, and the history and philosophy of science

The 'Social Magic' of Merit: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the English and Welsh Legal Profession

This working paper contributes to the debate over diversity and inclusion in the legal profession by exploring the meaning of 'merit' and its social and cultural context