This international conference, which launches the digital exhibition Comparative Guts, focuses on the representation of human innards (especially those involved in digestion and nutrition, what English refers to as ‘guts’) in a variety of world contexts, genres, traditions media and historical periods, from the Neolithic to the contemporary world. It aims to avoid the implicit framework of Eurocentrism by bringing together body representations from different regions, times and layers of human cultural production, emphasizing their irreducible variety and refusing to rank disciplines or contexts. Sensual experience, learned anatomy, religious feelings, medical practices, emotions, political sentiments, decorative intentions, ‘art’: each of these testifies to human reflections about our ‘embodied’ life, and each is valid in its own terms. ‘Comparative Guts’ accordingly explores the approaches of visual methods and image interpretation by foregrounding the potential of images to mediate anthropological information – with ‘image’ meaning not only the visually, optically perceived, but also mental images accessed through proprioceptive feelings, projection, auditory and olfactory stimulation.

For updated programme and details, see https://www.cluster-roots.uni-kiel.de/en/calendar-events/conferences-workshops/conference-comparative-guts or email comparativeguts@gmail.com.

Speakers:

ATLOMY. Orly Lewis; Yael Baron; Dmitry Ezrohi; Yotam Giladi; Shay Hermon; Nir Propper (ATLOMY Project, HUJI) Digital imaging and history of medicine
Jason Birch (SOAS University of London) Yoga and Ayurvedic Medicine in South Asia
Claire Bubb (New York University) Medieval Europe
Che-Chia Chang (Academia Sinica) China and Japan in the Modern Period
Thomas Cousins (School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford) Africa
Charlotte Damm (Arctic University of Norway) Hunter-fishers of Norway
Jane Draycott (University of Glasgow) Roman-etruscan materials
James Flowers (Kyung Hee University) Images of the digestive organs in Korea
Victor Golubev, Sean Coughlin (Czech Academy of Sciences) GUT SCENT – The Smell of Guts
Liv Green, Louise Bjerre (University of Copenhagen in Denmark) Maya, Aztech and their predecessors
Marta Hanson (Independent scholar, MPIWG Affiliate) An example of 17th-century Sino-European Cross-cultural medical history
Brooke Holmes (Princeton University) Contemporary Guts
Nathalie Köhle (The University of Sydney) Viscera Charts of the Yang Jie Tradition; Song China (960–1297) and Kamakura Japan (1185–1333)
Silja Korn (artist, Berlin) Lightpainting Art: der Kreislauf des Lebens
Vivienne Lo (UCL History) China
Gideon Manning (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles) Birth of modern anatomo-pathology
Robin Osborne (University of Cambridge) Greco-Roman antiquity
rodo pfister (Research Institute for the History of Afroeurasian Life Sciences (RIHAELS), Basel, Switzerland, Basel, Switzerland) The body maps of Master Yan Luo as used in meditation, anatomically corrected by superintendent Zhu
Ignacio Sanchez (University of Warwick) Arabic Materials
Nina Sellars (University of Melbourne) Drawing Breath >< Gut Feelings: an experimental anatomical art lab for contemporary dance
Brigitte Sonne, Ulla Odgaard (University of Copenhagen) Greenland.
Chiara Thumiger (Cluster of Excellence Roots, CAU Kiel) Greco-Roman medical cultures
Tawni Tidwell (University of Wisconsin) Tibetan medicine (8th to 17th century)/ Katharina Sabernig (University of Applied Arts) Tibetan medicine (8th to 17th century) with contemporary knitted artwork interpretations (early 20th to 21st century)
Marco Vespa (Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Atlomy ERC Project) The ancient stomachion, a Graeco-Roman gut-game
Yi-Li Wu (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA) Asia—China—Ming Qing illustrations of the organs, 1640–1847