Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds by Mackenzie Cooley & Anna Toledano & Duygu Yıldırım

Author:Mackenzie Cooley & Anna Toledano & Duygu Yıldırım
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

AMONG THE MELANCHOLIC BODIES OF THE TURKS

Coffee talks were where divergent narratives were marshaled to different ends. Thinking with and through coffee was a means to imagine what Ottoman bodies were like. The curious history of coffee was thus the history of the body, too. Even those flattened histories of cross-cultural interactions help us see the intertwined ways of making sense of human diversity. In its many luminous moments, Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s (1658–1730)—aristocrat, naturalist, military general, and the founder of Institute of Arts and Sciences in Bologna—account of his experiences in Ottoman lands reveals the double process in which elite knowledge of nature redefined the main subjects of his natural inquiry, that is, Ottoman bodies.34

Marsigli both joined and expanded upon a longer convention oriented toward the Islamic world. For one, he underscored the limits of European knowledge about the Ottomans despite their geographic proximity. In Marsigli’s view, a holistic understanding of a distinct culture was vital, beginning with its military order and culminating in its nature. Thinking both with and beyond the persistent narrative loops about the Ottomans, Marsigli insisted on the urgency of a new narrative trajectory, paying special attention to Ottoman military, religious, and cultural traditions, as well as to their history and natural environments, in the same manner that ancient philosophers described:

the air in which we live, the foods that nourish us, the beverages which quench our thirst, the motion that keep us, the houses that protect us, the diseases that ruin us, the affects and the passions of the mind that change us.35

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