| Abstract | Paper -a:
Indian medicine's influence over and place within other world traditions has often been overlooked. Recent interest in Buddhist medicine has produced important research on the cross-civilizational and transcultural history of Indian medicine throughout Asia, but has not detailed its place within these other traditions. This paper takes two case studies of medieval medical cultures, whose traditions, while wholly derived from other extant traditions, adopted Indian medical knowledge as an extra source for medical information but not for medical theory. Japan's appropriation of the continental Sino-Korean medical tradition and the Islamic world's translation and incorporation of the Greco-Roman tradition were each coupled with the inclusion of Indian medical knowledge. In other words, both Japan and the Islamic world derived canonical medical theory from non-Indian sources but incorporated Indian medical knowledge. Through these two case studies, this paper also reveals the different forms of normalization of Indian medicine in Asia and sheds light on the routes of its transmission.
Paper -b:
This paper resituates the challenges and opportunities of traditional Chinese guilds confronted with 'otherness' in the 1800s.Things that were 'Other' to the guilds here include Qing dynasty administration, self-dependent populations in the social structure, and the foreign corporations or products that flooded to China under international treaties. However, the traditional Chinese guilds' communications and relationships with these forms of 'otherness' offered three challenges: how could the guilds compete with the newly appeared foreign traders in the market? Would it be possible, or necessary, to obtain any guarantees from the Qing government or its populations? If not, what measures would be necessary for the guilds to survive in premodern Qing society? Considering the challenges and opportunities that legal and structural improvements might have brought to the broad practices and experiences of traditional Chinese guilds provides us with a thought-provoking discussion.
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