The imperial and colonial contexts in which modern science and scholarship came of age haunt us to this day. Be it the origin of museum collections, the Eurocentrism of history textbooks and academic curricula, or the lack of minority ethnic university staff—the shadows of an imperial past loom large upon us today.
The German Historical Institute London is proud to collaborate with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation on a new lecture series on Science, Knowledge, and the Legacy of Empire consisting of eight lectures over fours years. Join us for the sixth lecture of the series given by Helen Tilley (Northwestern University) on 19 May 2025 at the GHI London. She will talk about "Thinking with Blind Men and Elephants: A Dialogue on Personhood, Empires, and Unknowable Things".
This talk uses the South Asian parable of “The Blind Men and the Elephant” as its point of departure to explore different fault lines in the science/knowledge divide in global history. I hope to prompt debate about the nature of empires and the blind spots they produce. At the heart of the talk are pressing concerns about planetary health and human values. It builds upon comparative work in Iberian, British, Belgian, and French empires and their links to African history in order to take up points relating to languages and translation, ontologies and unknowns, and personhood and legal fictions. Some of the talk uses two works-in-progress as examples: an English translation of a 1910 Yorùbá reference book on healing (Ìwé Ìwòsàn) by Joseph Odùmósù (1863-1911). And a nearly complete book exploring the global history of traditional medicine as a legal and ethnographic construct. Because students of empire must train deeply and teach broadly, the talk will invite participants to think about how to trespass across disciplines and continents judiciously. I would like to generate deeper dialogue about different kinds of human conflict and consciousness that are often overshadowed in venues of global governance, but deserve more attention for those who seek to build a more just world.
Helen Tilley studies African colonial and global history and has paid particular attention to the medical, human, and environmental sciences. She has courtesy appointments in the Pritzker School of Law and the Anthropology Department at Northwestern University. She is the author of Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (2011), editor of Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge, and Law (2021), and has just finished a collaborative Yorùbá to English translation with Michael Ọládẹ̀jọ Afọláyan of a 1910 Book of Healing (Ìwé Ìwòsàn) which will be published this autumn. She is also completing a book manuscript on the global and legal histories of traditional medicine and indigenous knowledge since 1870 with a special focus on African precedents.
This lecture will be repeated at the University of Durham on 20 May 2025.
