Francesca Bray

Science, technique, technology: passages between matter and knowledge in imperial Chinese agriculture

Many historians today prefer to speak of knowledge and practice rather than science and technology. Here I argue for the value of reinstating the terms science, techniques and technology as tools for a more precise analysis of governmentality and the workings of power. My tactic is to use these three categories and their articulations to highlight flows between matter and ideas in the production and reproduction of knowledge. In any society, agriculture offers a wonderfully rich case of how ideas, material goods and social relations interweave. In China agronomy was a science of state, the basis of legitimate rule. I compare different genres of agronomic treatise to highlight what officials, landowners and peasants respectively contributed to, and expected from, this charged natural knowledge. I ask how new forms of textual and graphic inscription for encoding agronomic knowledge facilitated its dissemination and ask how successful this knowledge proved when rematerialized and tested as concrete artefacts or techniques. I highlight forms of innovation in response to crisis, and outline the overlapping interpretative frameworks within which the material applications of Chinese agricultural science confirmed and extended its truth across space and time.

Swords into Plowshares: A Study of Agricultural Technology and Society in Early China

A great deal is now known about the two earliest Chinese dynasties, the Shang (from ca. 1800 to between 1154 and 1022 B.c.) and the Chou (1154-221 B.C.). We are well informed as to their geographical features and climate; the size of their cities; and the skill of their metalworkers, potters, and weavers as well as many aspects of their social and political organization. Very little is known, however, about the agriculture which supported these civilizations. On the basis of what little archaeological and textual evidence there is, most modern scholars incline to the view that both Shang and early Chou were supported by very primitive cultivation techniques, and they have made exhaustive studies of the exiguous evidence to prove their point.1 However, it seems to me highly improbable that a great civilization on the scale of the Shang should have been supported by primitive

Only Connect: Comparative, National, and Global History as Frameworks for the History of Science and Technology in Asia

We might think that scholars in the fields of national, comparative, world, or global history of science and technology engage with each other in fruitful dialogue and see their works as part of a common cumulative project. But such is not usually the case. This article identifies and compares the research agendas and the possible linkages or terms of engagement that characterize these contrasting historiographical frameworks, noting their distinctive potentials for integrating scholarship on Asia into the mainstream disciplines of history of science and history of technology.

A Response to “The STS Challenge to Philosophy of Science in Taiwan”

Lamenting the absence of fruitful dialogue between philosophers of science and STS scholars in Taiwan, Ruey-Lin Chen argues that each field can and should help the other to improve. In particular, if I have understood Chen’s arguments correctly, philosophers of science could learn from STS to pay closer attention to the social aspects of scientific activity, to social understandings of what science is, and to the political or ethical implications of scientific practice in a modern technoscientific society like Taiwan. The field of STS, meanwhile, could benefit both reflexively and methodologically from the philosophy of science by paying more rigorous analytical attention to its own theoretical lineages, internal contradictions, and truth-claims; by attending more closely to the validity of the scientific arguments at the core of most STS case studies; and by developing its capacity as a discipline to proceed from the level of specific case study to generalization. Chen’s arguments for what STS has to gain from a dialogue with the philosophy of science are based on the proposition that STS is, fundamentally, a science, albeit a social science. Greater philosophical rigor, reflexive and interpretive, would thus contribute positively to its “normal development.” Certainly any scholarly field benefits from rigorous critical attention to its epistemological practices; it would be hard to disagree with Chen on that point. But do STS practitioners in fact construe the field asa“science,”andwhatmightthetraditionofAnglo-Saxonanalyticalphilosophythat Chen identifies as the forte of Taiwanese philosophy of science contribute to it? In my opinion one can make a strong case that STS (like “sociology of scientific knowledge” before it) is a project rather than a discipline or a science, and is recognized as such by its practitioners. It is a shared goal, namely, the unpacking and challenging of technocratic authority, that gives coherence to STS, rather than any aspirations to a unified theory, or any agreed bounding or framing of the object of analysis. The field of STS is essentially political, a spectrum of exercises in demystification ranging from the gendering of electric shavers to the transnational governance of nuclear power to claims about the separation of the social and the

SHOT: Internationalization and the Art of Translation

This is an important emotional and intellectual anniversary for me: it is forty years (all but a few weeks) since I first set foot in Singapore on my very first visit to Asia. On 8 September 1976 I stumbled off the plane at Changi Airport into the warm tropical dusk, fragrant with frangipani blossom and wood smoke. Singapore was a brief stopover on my way to Kelantan in Malaysia, where I was to spend a year working with rice farmers on the impact of Green Revolution technologies.1 Peering out of the taxi as we raced from Changi Airport into town I saw dim lamplight from the kampongs reflected in the shallow waters of rice-paddies. I was ecstatic: at last I had made it to the rice-growing tropics that I had so long wanted to study first hand, and in Singapore I would have a chance to explore my first truly Chinese city.2 The next morning I had a shock. The headlines on the newsstands proclaimed the death of Chairman Mao. China, the civilization I studied, was

SHOT (Society for the History of Technology): Internationalization and the art of translation

This is an important emotional and intellectual anniversary for me: it is forty years (all but a few weeks) since I first set foot in Singapore on my very first visit to Asia. On 8 September 1976 I stumbled off the plane at Changi Airport into the warm tropical dusk, fragrant with frangipani blossom and wood smoke. Singapore was a brief stopover on my way to Kelantan in Malaysia, where I was to spend a year working with rice farmers on the impact of Green Revolution technologies.1 Peering out of the taxi as we raced from Changi Airport into town I saw dim lamplight from the kampongs reflected in the shallow waters of rice-paddies. I was ecstatic: at last I had made it to the rice-growing tropics that I had so long wanted to study first hand, and in Singapore I would have a chance to explore my first truly Chinese city.2 The next morning I had a shock. The headlines on the newsstands proclaimed the death of Chairman Mao. China, the civilization I studied, was

Science, Language, and the Purity of Bottled Water

We need to renew our scientific lexicon, argues Evelyn Fox Keller, if we are to meet the challenges set by emerging fields like systems biology. Current scientific “ways of knowing” are built around nouns and committed to entity realism, Keller argues. They are thus unsuited to encompassing the dynamic interactivity of living systems that has become the chief object of investigation in a growing range of scientific fields, notably ecology and epigenetics as well as systems biology. Keller suggests that other linguistic traditions, perhaps those that are verbrather than noun-oriented, might offer resources for developing a better-adapted scientific lexicon. But perhaps Indo-European grammatical categories like noun and verb are in themselves an obstacle, an ingrained element of a supposedly “universal” but in fact inherently anglophone scientific expression whose limits we need to recognize. As her argument unfolds, we realize that Keller is using the distinction between noun and verb as a metaphorical relationship, equivalent perhaps to that between node and edge in flowchart diagramming. Although I shall continue to use Keller’s labels noun and verb for convenience in what follows, I would argue that her essay makes the case for the value not so much of thinking with verbs per se as of thinking with specific verbs that denote process or relationship (to grow, to change, to respond, to become); with particular verbal forms, notably auxiliary verbs andmodes of conjugation that express potential and flexibility (might, must, could, should ), and gerunds, that in themselves convey process (growing, becoming); and with the prepositions (to, from, by, with, etc.) attached to verbs that likewise express relationships. In seeking better ways to express complex and contingent relationships or systems in transformation, there is certainly much to be gained by reflecting on the resources offered by other linguistic traditions. For many reasons—political, institutional, and linguistic—English replaced Latin, then French, and finally German as the inter-

SHOT (Society for the History of Technology)

This is an important emotional and intellectual anniversary for me: it is forty years (all but a few weeks) since I first set foot in Singapore on my very first visit to Asia. On 8 September 1976 I stumbled off the plane at Changi Airport into the warm tropical dusk, fragrant with frangipani blossom and wood smoke. Singapore was a brief stopover on my way to Kelantan in Malaysia, where I was to spend a year working with rice farmers on the impact of Green Revolution technologies.1 Peering out of the taxi as we raced from Changi Airport into town I saw dim lamplight from the kampongs reflected in the shallow waters of rice-paddies. I was ecstatic: at last I had made it to the rice-growing tropics that I had so long wanted to study first hand, and in Singapore I would have a chance to explore my first truly Chinese city.2 The next morning I had a shock. The headlines on the newsstands proclaimed the death of Chairman Mao. China, the civilization I studied, was

Rice in Malaya: A Study in Historical Geography

As a student in New Zealand in the late 1950s, R. D. Hill fell under the spell of historical geographers Carl Sauer and Derwent Whittlesey, becoming fascinated with agricultural origins and with landscape as palimpsest. Beginning at home with a study of the introduction of European agriculture to New Zealand, when Hill was appointed to the Geography Department of the newly founded University of Singapore in 1962, he turned his attention to rice farming and its historical trajectories. Rice in Malaya, published fifteen years after Hill began his Southeast Asian research, is the fruit of meticulous archival, ethnographic, and environmental mapping. A thoroughly documented, judicious survey of a complex and fascinating regional history, Rice in Malaya is indeed a “Southeast Asian Classic,” and it is good to see it back in print.

Instructive and Nourishing Landscapes

Throughout the imperial era the Chinese state took an active role in promoting the livelihood of farmers. Here I focus on the diffusion of an iconic wet-rice landscape (figure 10.1) to ask how the fundamental values of governance characteristic of the Chinese state, in conjunction with administrative techniques, relations with commerce, and the geographical scale of the territories under state control, affected the growth of rural economies and the exploitation of key natural resources. I shall concentrate mainly on the period between 1500 and 1800 when China’s economy and population were in more or less steady expansion, thus increasing the pressure on environment and natural resources.