Bridie Andrews Minehan, Assistant Professor, History, Bentley College
| DATE: | Monday, October 3, 2005 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 4:00 PM |
| PLACE: | 140 Barrows Hall |
| FORMAT: | Colloquium |
| SPONSORS: | Office for History of Science and Technology, UCSF History of Health Sciences, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Center for Chinese Studies |
In twentieth-century China, political leaders were often critical of traditional knowledge. Confucian education was blamed for inhibiting the natural sciences; the structure of the Chinese literary language was blamed for "inhibiting rational thought," and such skills as geomancy (fengshui) and traditional medicine were despised as superstitious, or unhygienic, or both. Yet today many of these judgments have been reversed, both in China and abroad. This talk concentrates on the social and textual technologies used to make apparently esoteric Chinese knowledge transparent and transferable. My working hypothesis is that Chinese reformers succeeded in reclassifying their culture: they took traditional categories of knowledge and reformulated them using new rubrics and modern information retrieval tools. The first implication of this research is that the organization of knowledge is a highly political act, in this case successfully repackaging unacceptably traditional forms of knowledge in acceptably modern ways. The second implication concerns the importance of printing for the development of western modernity. Very cheap books were widely available in China since at least the 16th century, without leading to a vernacularization of elite knowledge, a religious reformation, or a renaissance in arts and sciences – all of which, in Europe, are sometimes traced to the availability of cheap printed texts. Instead, similar developments occurred in China when texts were indexed and rearranged in ways that made their contents transparent.
Free and open to the public.
