Casting Copper, Casting Selves: Metallurgy, Community, and Artisanal Sanskrit

Sponsor: Harvard University South Asian Studies Colloquium Presents

Speaker: Eric Moses Gurevitch, Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

Abstract: 

What did it mean to cast metallic objects in early modern South Asia? And how did caste communities define themselves through this labor? This presentation explores Sanskrit writings written by and about coppersmiths, artisans, and architects in Western India. These texts embed epistemological, ontological, and theological reflections within genealogical accounts of the origins of professional communities and the origins of their profession. Relating particular ways of manipulating matter to particular communities of practice, the presentation then goes on to investigate writings about smelting and alloying produced in the same contexts, where the properties of matter came to define a novel artisanal Sanskrit and a poetics of craft that can be found in metallurgical, alchemical, and architectural texts.

Eric Moses Gurevitch is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Gurevitch’s research explores the histories of science and technology in the medieval and early modern periods, with a focus on South Asia. It narrates a global history in which unexpected voices, practices, and events come to stand alongside standard narratives. Gurevitch’s first monograph is titled Everyday Sciences: Practical Knowledge and Knowledgeable Practice in South Asia (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press). His second project brings together questions of craft, technology, and caste to tell an intellectual history that extends beyond the history of intellectuals.