Footbinding as Fashion

Footbinding as Fashion
Author: John Robert Shepherd
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2018-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295744421

Previous studies of the practice of footbinding in imperial China have theorized that it expressed ethnic identity or that it served an economic function. By analyzing the popularity of footbinding in different places and times, Footbinding as Fashion investigates the claim that early Qing (1644–1911) attempts by Manchu rulers to ban footbinding made it a symbol of anti-Manchu sentiment and Han identity and led to the spread of the practice throughout all levels of society. Detailed case studies of Taiwan, Hebei, and Liaoning provinces exploit rich bodies of previously neglected ethnographic reports, economic surveys, and rare censuses of footbinding to challenge the significance of sedentary female labor and ethnic rivalries as factors leading to the hegemony of the footbinding fashion. The study concludes that, independently of identity politics and economic factors, variations in local status hierarchies and elite culture coupled with status competition and fear of ridicule for not binding girls’ feet best explain how a culturally arbitrary fashion such as footbinding could attain hegemonic status.

Knowing Manchuria

Knowing Manchuria
Author: Ruth Rogaski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2022-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 022680965X

"Knowing Manchuria places the creation of knowledge about nature at the center of our understanding of one of the world's most contested borderlands. At the intersection of China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia, Manchuria is known as a site of war and environmental extremes, where projects of political control intersected with projects designed to make sense of Manchuria's multiple environments. Covering over 500,000 square miles (comparable in size to all the land east of the Mississippi) Manchuria's landscapes included temperate rain forests, deserts, prairies, cultivated plains, wetlands, and Siberian taiga. Ruth Rogaski reveals how paleontologists and indigenous shamans, and many others, made sense of the Manchurian frontier. She uncovers how natural knowledge and thus "the nature of Manchuria" itself changed over time, from a sacred "land where the dragon arose" to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic "wasteland" to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation"--

Translating Early Modern China

Translating Early Modern China
Author: Carla Nappi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198866399

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories--of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator--serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.

Historical epistemology and the making of modern Chinese medicine

Historical epistemology and the making of modern Chinese medicine
Author: Howard Chiang
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2015-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1784991910

This collection expands the history of Chinese medicine by bridging the philosophical concerns of epistemology and the history and cultural politics of transregional medical formations. Topics range from the spread of gingko’s popularity from East Asia to the West to the appeal of acupuncture for complementing in-vitro fertilisation regimens, from the modernisation of Chinese anatomy and forensic science to the evolving perceptions of the clinical efficacy of Chinese medicine. The individual essays cohere around the powerful theoretical-methodological approach, 'historical epistemology', which challenges the seemingly constant and timeless status of such rudimentary but pivotal dimensions of scientific process as knowledge, reason, argument, objectivity, evidence, fact, and truth. In studying the globalising role of medical objects, the contested premise of medical authority and legitimacy, and the syncretic transformations of metaphysical and ontological knowledge, contributors illuminate how the breadth of the historical study of Chinese medicine and its practices of knowledge-making in the modern period must be at once philosophical and transnational in scope.

Looking at it from Asia: the Processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science

Looking at it from Asia: the Processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science
Author: Florence Bretelle-Establet
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2010-06-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9048136768

How do Documents Become Sources? Perspectives from Asia and Science Florence Bretelle-Establet From Documents to Sources in Historiography The present volume develops a specific type of critical analysis of the written documents that have become historians’ sources. For reasons that will be explained later, the history of science in Asia has been taken as a framework. However, the issue addressed is general in scope. It emerged from reflections on a problem that may seem common to historians: why, among the huge mass of written documents available to historians, some have been well studied while others have been dismissed or ignored? The question of historical sources and their (unequal) use in historiography is not new. Which documents have been used and favored as historical sources by historians has been a key historiographical issue that has occupied a large space in the historical production of the last four decades, in France at least.

The Emperor's New Mathematics

The Emperor's New Mathematics
Author: Catherine Jami
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199601402

Jami explores how the emperor Kangxi solidified the Qing dynasty in 17th-century China through the appropriation of the 'Western learning', and especially the mathematics, of Jesuit missionaries. This text details not only the history of mathematical ideas, but also their political and cultural impact.

The Vaccinators

The Vaccinators
Author: Ann Jannetta
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2007-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 080477949X

In Japan, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, smallpox claimed the lives of an estimated twenty percent of all children born—most of them before the age of five. When the apathetic Tokugawa shogunate failed to respond, Japanese physicians, learned in Western medicine and medical technology, became the primary disseminators of Jennerian vaccination—a new medical technology to prevent smallpox. Tracing its origins from rural England, Jannetta investigates the transmission of Jennerian vaccination to and throughout pre-Meiji Japan. Relying on Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and English sources, the book treats Japanese physicians as leading agents of social and institutional change, showing how they used traditional strategies involving scholarship, marriage, and adoption to forge new local, national, and international networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Vaccinators details the appalling cost of Japan's almost 300-year isolation and examines in depth a nation on the cusp of political and social upheaval.