Associated Products
Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Book)Title: Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China
Title: Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China
Author: He Bian
Author: He Bian
Abstract: Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China’s early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy—as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine—resists easy characterization. While China’s long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rejecting narratives of intellectual stagnation or an unchanging folk culture, He Bian argues that pharmacy’s history in early modern China can best be understood as a dynamic interplay between elite and popular culture.
Beginning with decentralizing trends in book culture and fiscal policy in the sixteenth century, Bian reveals pharmacy’s central role in late Ming public discourse. Fueled by factional politics in the early 1600s, amateur investigation into pharmacology reached peak popularity among the literati on the eve of the Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. The eighteenth century witnessed a systematic reclassification of knowledge, as the Qing court turned away from pharmacopeia in favor of a demedicalized natural history. Throughout this time, growth in long-distance trade enabled the rise of urban pharmacy shops, generating new knowledge about the natural world.
Bringing together a wealth of primary sources, Know Your Remedies makes an essential contribution to the study of Chinese history and the history of medicine.
Abstract: Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China’s early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy—as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine—resists easy characterization. While China’s long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rejecting narratives of intellectual stagnation or an unchanging folk culture, He Bian argues that pharmacy’s history in early modern China can best be understood as a dynamic interplay between elite and popular culture.
Beginning with decentralizing trends in book culture and fiscal policy in the sixteenth century, Bian reveals pharmacy’s central role in late Ming public discourse. Fueled by factional politics in the early 1600s, amateur investigation into pharmacology reached peak popularity among the literati on the eve of the Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. The eighteenth century witnessed a systematic reclassification of knowledge, as the Qing court turned away from pharmacopeia in favor of a demedicalized natural history. Throughout this time, growth in long-distance trade enabled the rise of urban pharmacy shops, generating new knowledge about the natural world.
Bringing together a wealth of primary sources, Know Your Remedies makes an essential contribution to the study of Chinese history and the history of medicine.
Year: 2020
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179049/know-your-remediesPrimary URL:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179049/know-your-remediesPrimary URL Description: Publisher's webpage.
Primary URL Description: Publisher's webpage.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780691179049
ISBN: 9780691179049
Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Book)Title: Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City
Author: Darren Byler
Abstract: In Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority group in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang. He shows that the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, Byler shows how media infrastructures, the state’s enforcement of “Chinese” cultural values, and the influx of Han Chinese settlers contribute to Uyghur dispossession and their expulsion from the city. He particularly attends to the experiences of young Uyghur men—who are the primary target of state violence—and how they develop masculinities and homosocial friendships to protect themselves against gendered, ethnoracial, and economic violence. By tracing the political and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization, Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with a colonial relation of domination.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/terror-capitalismPrimary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4780-176
Prizes
Gregory Bateson Book Prize
Date: 10/13/2023
Organization: Society for Cultural Anthropology
Abstract: The Gregory Bateson Book Prize is awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA), the largest section of the American Anthropological Association. Named after distinguished anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist, and photographer Gregory Bateson, the award reflects the SCA’s mandate to promote theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded research that engages the most current thinking across the arts and sciences. Welcoming a wide range of styles and arguments, the Gregory Bateson Prize looks to single out work that is interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative. This year the Gregory Bateson Book Prize Jury honors three winners and one honorable mention. The jury reviewed over seventy books from a number of presses over a four month period. There were a number of outstanding submissions, reflecting the breadth and scope of the discipline. Ultimately the four books the jury chose reflect, each in their unique way, a deeply ethical ethnographic integrity, political comm
Margaret Mead Book Award
Date: 3/29/2024
Organization: Society for Applied Anthropology
Abstract: The Margaret Mead Award, offered jointly by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), is presented to a younger scholar for a particular accomplishment, such as a book, film, monograph, or service, which interprets anthropological data and principles in ways that make them meaningful to a broadly concerned public. The award is designed to recognize a person clearly and integrally associated with research and/or practice in anthropology. The awardee’s activity will exemplify skills in broadening the impact of anthropology — skills for which Margaret Mead was admired widely.
Nominees for the 2024 award must have received the PhD degree after January 1, 2014 (ten years or less ago). Each application must include the nominee’s curriculum vitae, 2 letters of recommendation describing the accomplishment and documenting its impact on relevant publics beyond the discipline, and four copies of the book or film.
In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony (Book)Title: In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony
Author: Darren Byler
Abstract: A cruel and high-tech form of colonization has been unfolding over the past decade in China’s vast northwestern region of Xinjiang, where as many as a million and a half Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Hui have vanished into high-security camps and associated factories. It is the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II.
Darren Byler, one of the world's leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance, draws on a decade of research on the region, examining thousands of government documents and conducting many hours of interviews with both detainees and camp workers. Byler tells the stories of people like U.S. college student Vera, police contractor Baimurat, camp instructor Qelbinur, Kazakh farmer Adilbek, and truck driver Erbakyt, who show how a sophisticated network of facial surveillance, voice recognition, and smartphone tracking technology, built by private corporations, enabled authorities to blacklist Muslims for “pre-crimes” that sometimes consist only of having installed social media apps. Their stories narrate a process of surveillance overwhelming life, and push Byler to examine how technological tools that are being built in locations from Seattle to Beijing are being adapted to create forms of unfreedom for vulnerable people around the world.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/in-the-camps/Primary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: Columbia University Global Reports
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781735913629
The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public (Book)Title: The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public
Author: Shaohua Guo
Abstract: Despite widespread consensus that China's digital revolution was sure to bring about massive democratic reforms, such changes have not come to pass. While scholars and policy makers alternate between predicting change and disparaging a stubbornly authoritarian regime, in this book Shaohua Guo demonstrates how this dichotomy misses the far more complex reality. The Evolution of the Chinese Internet traces the emergence and maturation of one of the most creative digital cultures in the world through four major technological platforms: the bulletin board system, the blog, the microblog, and WeChat. Guo transcends typical binaries of freedom and control, to argue that Chinese Internet culture displays a uniquely sophisticated interplay between multiple extremes, and that its vibrancy is dependent on these complex negotiations. In contrast to the flourishing of research findings on what is made invisible online, this book examines the driving mechanisms that grant visibility to particular kinds of user-generated content. Offering a systematic account of how and why an ingenious Internet culture has been able to thrive, Guo highlights the pivotal roles that media institutions, technological platforms, and creative practices of Chinese netizens have played in shaping culture on- and offline.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32857Primary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503613775
Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China (Book)Title: Drawing from Life: Sketching and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China
Author: Christine Ho
Abstract: Drawing from Life explores revolutionary drawing and sketching in the early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965) in order to discover how artists created a national form of socialist realism. Tracing the development of seminal works by the major painters Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, author Christine I. Ho reconstructs how artists grappled with the representational politics of a nascent socialist art. The divergent approaches, styles, and genres presented in this study reveal an art world that is both heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. Through a history of artistic practices in pursuit of Maoist cultural ambitions—to forge new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities—this original book argues that socialist Chinese art presents a critical, alternative vision for global modernism.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520309623/drawing-from-lifePrimary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520309623
Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (Book)Title: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China
Author: Peter B. Lavelle
Abstract: In the nineteenth century, the Qing empire experienced a period of profound turmoil caused by an unprecedented conjunction of natural disasters, domestic rebellions, and foreign incursions. The imperial government responded to these calamities by introducing an array of new policies and institutions to bolster its power across its massive territories. In the process, Qing officials launched campaigns for natural resource development, seeking to take advantage of the unexploited lands, waters, and minerals of the empire’s vast hinterlands and borderlands.
In this book, Peter B. Lavelle uses the life and career of Chinese statesman Zuo Zongtang (1812–1885) as a lens to explore the environmental history of this era. Although known for his pacification campaigns against rebel movements, Zuo was at the forefront of the nineteenth-century quest for natural resources. Influenced by his knowledge of nature, geography, and technology, he created government bureaus and oversaw state-funded projects to improve agriculture, sericulture, and other industries in territories across the empire. His work forged new patterns of colonial development in the Qing empire’s northwest borderlands, including Xinjiang, at a time when other empires were scrambling to secure access to resources around the globe. Weaving a narrative across the span of Zuo’s lifetime, The Profits of Nature offers a unique approach to understanding the dynamic relationship among social crises, colonialism, and the natural world during a critical juncture in Chinese history, between the high tide of imperial power in the eighteenth century and the challenges of modern state-building in the twentieth century.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-profits-of-nature/9780231194709Primary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780231194709
Tea War: A history of Capitalism in China and India (Book)Title: Tea War: A history of Capitalism in China and India
Author: Andrew Liu
Abstract: Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300243734/tea-war/Primary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300243734
Export Furniture and Artisanal Translation in Eighteenth-Century Canton (Article)Title: Export Furniture and Artisanal Translation in Eighteenth-Century Canton
Author: Kyoungjin Bae
Abstract: During the eighteenth century, cabinetmakers in Canton (Guangzhou) produced a large quantity of hardwood furniture for European consumers. This essay examines the knowledge culture of these cabinetmakers, focusing on epistemic negotiations and adaptations in the process of making export furniture. While export furniture was made in European styles, cabinetmakers did not parrot European techniques of carpentry but creatively mobilized their own craft knowledge. Juxtaposing material evidence from extant pieces and the carpentry manual The Classic of Lu Ban, the essay argues that the knowledge of joinery formed the basis of a practice of artisanal translation that was material and syntactic. Offering modular rubrics for spatial handling, joinery allowed cabinetmakers to restructure and reinvent furniture with a European appearance. Tracing the interaction between an indigenous knowledge system and global trade commodities, the essay underlines the social and epistemic realignments of locally rooted craft in the achievement of innovation.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/719756?journalCode=isis#:~:text=Beginning%20in%20the%20early%20eighteenth,significant%20role%20in%20its%20emergence.Primary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society
Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals
The Imprisoned Queen: Landscape Representation and Pure Land Art in Tang China (Article)Title: The Imprisoned Queen: Landscape Representation and Pure Land Art in Tang China
Author: Anne N. Feng
Abstract: This paper reconsiders how and why the representation of landscape became an increasingly central component of Pure Land art in the Tang dynasty. Focusing on the seventh-century Cave 209, I examine the first set of mountain panels at Dunhuang, arguing that those polychrome landscapes represent Vulture Peak, the sacred abode of Śākyamuni Buddha. Cave 209 shows how Lady Vaidehī—the protagonist of the Meditation Sutra—emerges as the first female viewer of landscape in Chinese art. Departing from the Meditation Sutra, painters at Dunhuang resituate Lady Vaidehī, the formerly imprisoned royal consort and model Pure Land adept, within mountain ranges where she converses with the Buddha. I argue that Lady Vaidehī's encounter with the Buddha is mapped onto the space of a Dunhuang cave to enable the viewer to assume her position when facing the icon of Śākyamuni surrounded by Vulture Peak. By grappling with Vaidehī's imprisonment, painters use landscape to develop a new spatial imagery of salvation. I maintain that the striking innovations in landscape representation at Dunhuang—achievements that have been seen to anticipate later Tang “blue and green” landscapes—are in actuality based on an effort to visualize Buddhist soteriology in the early seventh century.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/archives-of-asian-art/article-abstract/71/1/1/173729/The-Imprisoned-QueenLandscape-Representation-andPrimary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Archives of Asian Art
Publisher: Duke University Press
A Tent for the Afterlife: Remarks on a Qinghai-Sichuanese Panel (Article)Title: A Tent for the Afterlife: Remarks on a Qinghai-Sichuanese Panel
Author: Mariachiara Gasparini
Abstract: Recent excavations in Qinghai Province, China, have disclosed textiles and artworks from Tuyuhun-Tubo (Tibetan) tombs, dated to the 7th-9th centuries, that suggest artistic and cultural exchanges along an external southern branch of the main Silk Road, between Gansu and Sichuan Provinces, across the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau toward the Himalayas. Many similar textiles, possibly from this area, have appeared lately on the art market and ended in private collections. Although these textiles, dated to the early Tibetan period, follow a popular prototype established in Central Asia in the 6th century, the technical features, colors, and other indigenous elements suggest that they were woven in workshops different from those established between Sogdiana and Gansu. The exhibition "Cultural Exchange Along the Silk Road - Masterpieces of the Tubo Period," organized by the Dunhuang Research Academy and the Pritzker Collaborative Art between July and October 2019 in Dunhuang, Gansu, was a groundbreaking event that gathered scholarly attention on early Tibetan material culture, but a relevant publication is still forthcoming. In my previous work, I briefly discussed a group of silk textiles, possibly from Qinghai or Sichuan, that I analyzed in 2014 in the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. In light of the recent material excavated, published online, or displayed in Dunhuang, in this article, I reevaluate the data previously collected, and discuss in detail the technical and iconographic features of one of the fragments held in Hangzhou. Eventually, the piece was recognized as the ending part of a large panel, which is now in the Abegg Stiftung in Riggisberg, Switzerland.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://actaviaserica.org/digital-library/manuscript/file/54843/Acta%20Via%20Serica(2021-2)-Articles-4(MARIACHIARA%20GASPARINI).pdfPrimary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Acta Via Sercia
Publisher: Acta Via Serica
Water Control and Policy-Making in the Shiji and Hanshu (Book Section)Title: Water Control and Policy-Making in the Shiji and Hanshu
Author: Luke Habberstad
Editor: Mark Csikszentmihalyi
Editor: Michael Nylan
Abstract: While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied "Treatises" and "Tables" compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later "Standard Histories" of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world's population).
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Technical-Arts-in-the-Han-Histories2Primary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Book Title: Technical Arts in the Han Histories; Tables and Treatises in the Shiji and Hanshu
ISBN: 9781438485430
Glass Containers’ Aura: The Gestalt of Material Milieu (Article)Title: Glass Containers’ Aura: The Gestalt of Material Milieu
Author: Lihong Liu
Abstract: Crystal glass containers as novel artefacts in the early modern period acted out their function of containment as miraculous material events. Focusing on glass containers used to contain and constitute Buddhist objects in China's Qing dynasty (1644–1911), this essay provides historical and critical views on issues of aura and containment. Primarily, it examines the modalities and experiences of container and containment as expressed in the Qing court's material, religious and political practices. In doing so, the essay highlights the fusional relationship between matter and form, while also apprehending the metamorphosis between image and object in processes of transmedial translation and transcultural crossing or dislocation. It argues that glass containers used to simulate, animate and amplify the ‘aura’ of devotional objects manifested more general religio-political and intercultural phenomena at that time. Those phenomena in turn invite reflections on material objects' immaterial expressions, and vice versa, in terms of the interplay between formal schema and amorphous force.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://academic.oup.com/arthistory/article-abstract/44/1/108/7276790?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=falsePrimary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Art History
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Toward Simla: Proposing Provinces and Claiming Territory on the Tibetan Plateau (Book Section)Title: Toward Simla: Proposing Provinces and Claiming Territory on the Tibetan Plateau
Author: Scott Relyea
Editor: Alka Acharya
Abstract: The Simla Convention of 1914, held between Great Britain, China, and Tibet, demarcated the border between India and Tibet and gave birth to the McMahon Line. This volume critically examines the legacy of the 1914 Convention and explores its relevance in scholarly discourse about the status of Tibet and Sino-Indian relations more than a hundred years later.
The book discusses the significance of the Simla Convention, both in terms of the geopolitics of boundaries as well as the people and the liminal borderlands they occupy, encapsulating the culture and diversity of the trans-Himalayan regions. The book explicates how colonial legacies, namely, the 1914 Simla Convention, have become virtual straitjackets, hardening the positions on the boundaries between India and China. It also looks at the debilitating consequences of the nation-state framework on more substantial investigations of the borderlands. Rich in archival material and drawing from the authors’ fieldwork in the Himalayan regions, this book analyses muted voices of the inhabitants of the region to bring into focus the larger question of the political, economic, religious, ecological, and social life of the Himalayan peoples, which has enormous implications for both India and China.
This volume will be of interest to students of history, international relations, sociology, strategic studies, Asian studies, and anthropology.
Year: 2022
Secondary URL:
https://www.routledge.com/Boundaries-and-Borderlands-A-Century-after-the-1914-Simla-Convention/Acharya/p/book/9781032225296Secondary URL Description: Publisher webpage.
Publisher: Routledge India
ISBN: 9781032225296