Shigehisa Kuriyama: The Great Forgetting

The Great Forgetting
Saturday, August 22, 3PM HKT
Location: 18/F Grand Marine Center, Empty Gallery, 3 Yue Fung Street, Hong Kong

In tandem with Ann Zhao’s exhibition “Spillover”, Empty Gallery is grateful to invite Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama for his first lecture in Hong Kong. “The Great Forgetting” will radically reimagine the single most decisive development in the history of medicine: the transition from traditional to modern medicine. Whereas prior histories have portrayed the transition as a shift from a pre-scientific to a scientific understanding of the body, this talk will spotlight the critical role of a entirely different, hitherto overlooked development: the forgetting of past intuitions of time.

It was above all these earlier intuitions of time, the talk will argue, that long made traditional medicine feel so compelling to people in the past; and it was the forgetting of these intuitions that now makes traditional medicine seem so strange and exotic. What were these intuitions? Unexpectedly, “Spillover” offers suggestive clues: Zhao’s evocation of her Ben Ming Nian as well as her eye for the propensities shaping particular “moments” lets us glimpse obliquely, but insightfully into the temporal experiences  at the heart of traditional medicine. Which is to say that that this past world is not truly past, but actually remains close at hand—though it is habitually overlooked and forgotten and waiting to be noticed and remembered. By bringing together Zhao’s artistic vision with a fresh perspective on the evolution of medicine, this lecture will try to illustrate how deeper reflection on the distant past can refresh and enliven our experience of the here and now.

—

Shigehisa Kuriyama is Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History at Harvard University. His research explores broad philosophical issues (being and time, representations and reality, knowing and feeling) through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (Japan, China, and Europe). His book, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone, 1999), received the 2001 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Spanish, and Korean. His current projects includes separate studies on 1)  the abrupt forgetting of the past, 2) the astonishingly persistent  sway of metaphors, and 3) the art of evoking happy places.  He is also deeply committed to advancing the art of scholarly communication and has conducted workshops on presentations in many universities around the world.