Amulet Tales: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt
Amulet Tales: Race, Magic, and Medicine in Egypt uses amuletic objects as archives to reveal how Upper Egyptian and Black African women healers—and the amulets they wielded—shaped the global development of anthropological expertise and the robust spiritual economy of healing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. Despite repeated campaigns by government officials and doctors to discredit their knowledge and outlaw their practices, wise women controlled a widespread market in occult objects that remained crucial in the everyday lives of Egyptians. The project combines Middle East history’s rich foundation of women’s and gender history, with insights from science and technology studies, critical race theory, and budding scholarship on the Islamicate occult sciences, to consider how racialized constructions of the Upper Egyptian and Black African women—along with the socio-medical, spiritual, and economic worlds they inhabited—shaped the making of “modern” Egypt. The development of anthropological thought in interwar Egypt and abroad, Moore argues, hinged on the study of “superstitious” healing practices (khorafa) or “old wives medicine” (tibb al-rukka) attributed to Upper Egyptian and enslaved and manumitted Black African healing practitioners. Wise women and their amulets found themselves entangled in the internationalization of social sciences not as mere objects of study or ‘go-betweens’ but critical producers of knowledge.
Speakers
-
Taylor Moore is a historian of science, medicine, and race in the Modern Middle East, specializing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. Dr. Moore's research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, decolonial materiality, and histories of science, technology, medicine, and the occult in the non-West. She is invested in using object archives to illuminate the occult(ed) networks, economies, and actors whose knowledge, bodies, and labor are generally rendered invisible in Eurocentric histories of global science. Her research on amuletic objects, occult texts, and material histories of the body encouraged my exploration into the promise of critical bibliographic methods for writing and teaching the social history of the Middle East and global histories of science, technology, and medicine. Dr. Moore is currently working to merge these interests as a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School.
-
Nefertiti Takla specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt with a focus on gender and sexuality. Dr. Takla's research interests include the role of race and gender in the historical development of capitalism, transnational discourses of crime and criminality, labor migration in the Mediterranean world, gendered violence, and global feminisms. Her first book manuscript, Raya and Sakina: Femicide and the Coloniality of Gender in Egypt, analyzes how wartime colonial exploitation led to a major femicide in northern Egyptian cities in the early interwar era, and how the coloniality of gender shaped the prosecution and popular portrayals of the femicide.