Presenter: Maria Pirogovskaya (LMU Munich)
Discussant: Nikolai Erofeev (Free University Berlin)
Organizer and moderator: Anna Mazanik (Max Weber Network Eastern Europe)
December 16, 16:00 CET
Abstract: In this talk, Maria Pirogovskaya will discuss how Buryat Tibetan medicine of Transbaikal Buddhist monasteries became a lucrative source of ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge in Soviet natural sciences and medicine during the interbellum period. Mining this knowledge as an archive and a mapping tool to unlock the 'productive forces' of Eastern Siberia, Soviet scientists sought to fight ‘pharmaceutical hunger’ and to discover new items for state exports. The presentation draws on the documentation of scientific expeditions to Transbaikal monasteries and natural habitats to reveal how attempts to adapt Tibetan knowledge for Soviet needs contributed to epistemological translations between heterodox and orthodox medicine, while also highlighting specific environments and the people associated with them.
Maria Pirogovskaya is a researcher at LMU Munich and a PI in the DFG-funded research project "Socialist Panaceas" that focuses on socialist health and medical heterodoxies in the long Soviet era. Before that, she worked as associate professor at the European University at St. Petersburg in 2016-2021 and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in 2021-2023. She has received her PhD from the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in 2016.
Nikolai Erofeev is a researcher at Free University Berlin. His current research focuses on the transnational history of mining industries in Inner Asia and their social-environmental impacts. He has received his PhD in history from the University of Oxford in 2020.
Please register to get the Zoom-link: https://forms.gle/1xQBsa4oUFMgtWSw7. The link will be sent on the day of the event. If you have not received the link one our before the event, please contact Anna Mazanik directly at anna.mazanik@mws-osteuropa.org
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