Global History of Science Seminar (GHOSS)

Abstract: 

Scholars agree that in his short story Ein Hungerkünstler (1922) (A Hunger Artist), Franz Kafka reproduced his own experience as a witness of public fasts – a popular source of entertainment in European (and American) cities around 1900. In earlier times, public fasting had been an act of religious abstinence and mystical asceticism, but it progressively became a commodity in the urban marketplace, which could be exploited for amusement and profit, but also as an appealing subject for scientific study. Although they could not compete with opera, animal menageries, freak shows, panoramas or early cinema, hunger artists’ performances attracted considerable interest. In spite of frequent suspicion of fraud, their shows were reported in newspapers, popular leaflets, but also in academic textbooks, scientific periodicals and medical journals

The paper discusses how professional fasters populated the “land of hunger artists”, a “strange” territory, which does not fit into national containers, standard biographies, narratives of scientific progress and modernity, or into traditional approaches to scientific experiments and medical specialities. The land of the hunger artists grew in a very large, loosely defined territory, which transcended cities, regions, nation-states and continents. Although the specific places in which fasting performances took place were mainly cities, the geography of hunger artists was much broader and idly defined.

Agutí Nieto-Galan: Professor of History of Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and ICREA Academia researcher (2009 & 2018). A chemist and historian, he has been a research fellow at the Faculty of Modern History at the University of Oxford and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. His research has focused on the history of chemistry (18th-20th centuries), the history of science popularization (18th-20th centuries), the urban history of science, and the relations between science and politics in the 20th century. His latest books are The Politics of Chemistry (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Tóxicos invisibles (Icaria, 2020; edited with Ximo Guillem-Llobat). He currently directs the new Institute for the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (IHC) at the UAB.