Kurzbeschreibung

The research project to be carried out during a two-month guest stay at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA) at the University of Oxford, aims at a reanalysis of the notions connected to female blood in Mesopotamian medical cuneiform texts of the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE. The researcher intends to write a study that elucidates the Babylonian healers' ideas and knowledge relating to female bleeding, in relation to cultural evaluations attached to bodily discharges in medical and other texts (e.g. myths, rituals). The study will show how views of female blood tie in with broader cultural concepts about the gendered body and human nature. The research will depart from previous studies by proposing a culture-specific conception of female bleeding in Mesopotamia differing from the notion of menstruation developed in the Hippocratic medicine - as a regular phenomenon restricted and essential to women's bodies. Integrating the textual and historical evidence with anthropological analyses of menstruation in non-Western cultures, the study will stress the ambivalent meanings attached to female bleeding in Mesopotamia, while shifting away from an overemphasis on notions of impurity and pollution, often regarded in current Assyriological research as decisive for Mesopotamian views on female blood.

Projektdetails

Projektart

Forschungsprojekt

Fachgruppe

Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften

Beginn

2011

Ende

2013

Finanzierung

The Wellcome Trust, London

Einrichtung

Fachbereich/Zentralinstitut

Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften

Institut/Seminar

BABMED - Babylonian Medicine

Projektteam

Leitung

Dr. Ulrike Steinert (Post-Doc)

Schlagwörter

Antike; Ethnomedizin; Frau; Frauen; Geschichte der Medizin; Geschlechterforschung (s.a. Soziologie); Griechische Antike; Heilkunst; Humanmedizin interdisziplinär; Kulturanthropologie; Körper; Medizingeschichte; Mesopotamien; Querschnittsthema-Gender

Forschende

• Dr. Ulrike Steinert (Post-Doc)

  Ehemalig