Southeast Asia has always been a productive region of confluences and circulations, where different intellectual traditions meet. This very plurality across the region does not allow it to fit comfortably within existing frameworks for writing the history of medicine. In this paper, I reflect on how we write about health and medicine today, as well as how Europeans historically wrote about their interactions with local actors in Southeast Asia about matters relating to health and medicine. By looking closely at cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and local actors in Southeast Asia, I hope to unpack mediated knowledge production and vocabularies from Southeast Asia. This paper attempts a close reading of three Dutch texts: a vocabulary book by Justus Heurnius (1650), and travel accounts by Nicolaus de Graaff (1701) and Johan Splinter Stavorinus (1793). Analysing these Dutch texts from the perspective of book history and production, I unravel the processes of observing, writing and packaging vocabularies from the region for an European audience. Through trajectories of knowledge circulations across Southeast Asia, to Europe and back, this approach offers future possibilities for considering intra-regional resonances, and positioning Southeast Asia within the global circulations of knowledge.
Melinda Susanto is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for History in Leiden University, where she is working on the histories of medicine in the Indian Ocean between 1600 and 1800. Prior to this, Melinda was an assistant curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where she worked on 19th and early 20th century art of Southeast Asia and art of the British Empire. Melinda holds an MA in Colonial and Global History from Leiden University, an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA in Art History and Ancient Greek from the Australian National University.
Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 3: Folk and Creole Epistemologies
3:30-5:30pm HK/SG time / 8:30-10:30am BST / 9:30-11:30am CEST / 3:30-5:30am EDT / 12:30-2:30am PDT