Dissertation Research: Science and Popular Culture in Traditional China

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The plurality of science in China is a large unexplored topic in the world history of science. Rather than a single narrative of traditional science, the issue calls for a new framework that acknowledges that many modes for understanding nature coexisted in pre-modern China. Most of these survived modernization and nation-building in the early twentieth century. This dissertation research project will examine the plurality of science in China, analyzing the relationship between science and popular culture from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. The approach of this doctoral dissertation subordinates the investigation of elite intellectual traditions that has so far dominated the historiography of Chinese science. Historians such as Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart have examined the transformation of European culture through the popularization of science in the eighteenth century; it is time to study Chinese counterparts. This study will add new perspectives to themes familiar to historians of western science such as the professionalization of scientists and the relationship between science and the nation-state, avoiding the one-dimensional approach. The relationship between science and popular culture offers a key framework not only for understanding the plurality of science in traditional China, but for showing in what ways its evolution differed from that of the European technical enterprise. That will make it possible to avoid conventionally exaggerating the very limited impact of small groups of reformist scientists and traditional doctors on Chinese culture. Popular understandings of nature, intermixed with elite intellectual traditions, pervaded every aspect of Chinese society from the imperial court to the peasant village. Despite the great diversity of customs and language within China, everyone shared an understanding of gods, ghosts, and spirits as intermediaries between man and the cosmos. The spiritual world affected the practice of science and medicine and, through state sacrifices and local rituals, organized craft production. The natural world served as a stage for social interactions that created and applied modes for rational understanding. This study will examine the diversity and flexibility of these human relations, and their underlying conceptions of the natural world, in the areas of craft production and healing. Studies so far indicate that attention to scholarly discourse, local and supra-local community relations, and state appropriation or suppression of popular religious practices will cast light on science, technology, and medicine as Chinese actually practiced them. This proposal requests $12,000 to be used over twelve months for travel to the archives in China and Taiwan.