Commodities in Context

Abstract

Earlier historians of medicine have often accepted medieval Russia’s isolation from Eurasian networks for exchanging knowledge, offering the absence of medical texts as proof of an absence of information. By contrast, this article argues that the Silk Roads’ connections to Russia consistently supplied pharmaceutical products and knowledge through merchants and their commodities, rather than through texts. This conclusion agrees with the idea of anthropologist Ken Adler, who advocated for considering commodities to be “thick things,” acquiring meanings and information necessary for their consumption and use. The study of material culture, therefore, offers an alternate approach for understanding Russia’s exchanges with East and West, rather than accepting that an absence of texts is proof of an absence of knowledge.