The question ultimately is: Does this sound like complete bullshit to you?
"Making Logic Local: Chinese Empire and the Relocation of Early Modern Natural History"
The Chinese empire was expanding dramatically in the early years of the Qing era. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists attempted to reconcile local knowledge from areas on China’s borderlands (Central Asia, Tibet, South Asia, the Islamic Near East) with canonical Chinese texts as these areas came under China’s rule. Natural history and medicine were transformed as a result.
My paper examines the media and forms of exchange that helped reconfigure natural knowledge in the growing early modern Chinese empire. New genres focused on locality gained textual authority in the natural history canon. Transliteration and other linguistic technologies were used to bridge epistemological divides. Recipes worked as little empires in microcosm, blending individual ingredients into compound wholes and mapping the results in labeled tables: indeed, the recipe form became a central vehicle in the drive to naturalize “foreign” texts, plants, and animals, and a fundamental medium for transmitting information.
New ways of configuring “place” in Chinese imperial natural history were made possible with textual authorities whose focus was geographical in new ways, with new modes of citing and seeing, and with new literary technologies of exchange. This paper will compare the structure and types of argument in pre-imperial and early Qing materia medica: ways of defining normalcy and pathology, of constructing and weighing evidence, and of using examples and comparisons. This study of the relationship between logics of argument and locality has the ultimate goal of laying the foundation for a comparative history of reason in Chinese natural history.
A significant methodological question rises from this work: in relocating science, technology, and medicine, can we also attempt to relocate some basic assumptions that undergird the study of STS: notions of “reason” and “logic”? What are the possibilities for such a study, and what might it look like to do that kind of work? It is my hope that a focused study of the mechanics of scientific debate and exchange can help make a study of localized epistemologies possible.
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The question ultimately is: Does this sound like complete bullshit to you?
"Making Logic Local: Chinese Empire and the Relocation of Early Modern Natural History"
The Chinese empire was expanding dramatically in the early years of the Qing era. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists attempted to reconcile local knowledge from areas on China’s borderlands (Central Asia, Tibet, South Asia, the Islamic Near East) with canonical Chinese texts as these areas came under China’s rule. Natural history and medicine were transformed as a result.
My paper examines the media and forms of exchange that helped reconfigure natural knowledge in the growing early modern Chinese empire. New genres focused on locality gained textual authority in the natural history canon. Transliteration and other linguistic technologies were used to bridge epistemological divides. Recipes worked as little empires in microcosm, blending individual ingredients into compound wholes and mapping the results in labeled tables: indeed, the recipe form became a central vehicle in the drive to naturalize “foreign” texts, plants, and animals, and a fundamental medium for transmitting information.
New ways of configuring “place” in Chinese imperial natural history were made possible with textual authorities whose focus was geographical in new ways, with new modes of citing and seeing, and with new literary technologies of exchange. This paper will compare the structure and types of argument in pre-imperial and early Qing materia medica: ways of defining normalcy and pathology, of constructing and weighing evidence, and of using examples and comparisons. This study of the relationship between logics of argument and locality has the ultimate goal of laying the foundation for a comparative history of reason in Chinese natural history.
A significant methodological question rises from this work: in relocating science, technology, and medicine, can we also attempt to relocate some basic assumptions that undergird the study of STS: notions of “reason” and “logic”? What are the possibilities for such a study, and what might it look like to do that kind of work? It is my hope that a focused study of the mechanics of scientific debate and exchange can help make a study of localized epistemologies possible.
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