Classifying the Unseen: Curiosity, Fantasy, and Common Knowledge in Early Modern China
This event will be hosted both in-person and online via Zoom. To attend online, please register. No registration is required to attend in person.Abstract:Classifying the Unseen explores how literate and marginally literate people in early modern China understood their natural world. To do so, it examines “epistemic” literature, including medical texts, encyclopedias, almanacs, and guidebooks that describe or hint at early scientific inquiry; local and court histories, gazetteers, and newspapers that recorded natural disasters, omens and unexplained phenomena; and “entertainment” literature – novels, anecdotes, and jottings created primarily to amuse and beguile but which also conveyed information. Existing histories of Chinese science concern themselves primarily with officials at court and their response to western science. I expand on these histories by examining debates on the margins of that elite discourse, often found in commentary, appendices, sequels, and supplements. By marking previously unexplored connections between practical and entertainment texts, elite and more marginal literature including newspapers, medical manuscripts, coroner’s manuals and family instructions, this work advances a more robust understanding of how an increasingly literate early modern China perceived and experienced the natural world. Classifying the Unseen examines the curious in context – revealing fears of people and practices (magical poison, secret medical practices) along the borders of an expanding empire, and foreign curiosities that penetrated its urban centers. It also seeks to understand how things were investigated and envisioned when they lacked visual context – either because they were everywhere (water, wind, life) or nowhere (dragons, the future).Faculty Host: Richard J. SmithThe Transnational Asia Speaker Series is made possible through the generosity of the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation.FreeAsian Studies, Chao Center for Asian Studieszoom注册地址：https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lCtK9CvLSdmetpHSkUU8Kg?#/registration
