Presentations by Kalle Kananoja and Catherine Popovici

Please join us for presentations by JCB Fellows Kalle Kananoja and Catherine Popovici. 

Kalle Kananoja (University of Helsinki), Almeida Family Fellow

"Medical Culture in Colonial Brazil"

This talk focuses on the intellectual history of healing and medical culture in Brazil. It highlights the views of physicians, surgeons, and Catholic priests on healing practices and practitioners, demonstrating how early modern medical theory reacted to hitherto unknown diseases. Academic medicine as well as religious and popular healing systems were all part of medically plural settings of Brazil, turning healing into contested knowledge. Therapeutic encounters also had the potential to lead to the emergence of hybrid practices when healing methods and medicinal substances were mixed on purpose. Yet, often the different healing modalities existed side by side with little interaction.

Catherine Popovici (The University of Texas at Austin), Helen Watson Buckner Memorial Fellow

"Marking Mountains and Consecrating Boundaries in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica"

In ancient Mesoamerica, boundaries, their environs, and elements of the natural world were marked and sacralized in numerous ways - sometimes by stone sculpture, frequently by ritual acts. By the early colonial period, indigenous representations of these spaces incorporated overt symbols of Catholicism. Relying on European prints, indigenous codices, and regional maps, this talk looks at the shifting material conceptions of consecrating and marking liminal locales in Mesoamerica.