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"Bray, Francesca"
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Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China
What can the history of technology contribute to our understanding of late imperial China? Most stories about technology in pre-modern China follow a well-worn plot: in about 1400 after an early ferment of creativity that made it the most technologically sophisticated civilisation in the world, China entered an era of technical lethargy and decline. But how are we to reconcile this tale, which portrays China in the Ming and Qing dynasties as a dying giant that had outgrown its own strength, with the wealth of counterevidence affirming that the country remained rich, vigorous and powerful at least until the end of the eighteenth century? Does this seeming contradiction mean that the stagnation story is simply wrong, or perhaps that technology was irrelevant to how imperial society worked? Or does it imply that historians of technology should ask better questions about what technology was, what it did and what it meant in pre-modern societies like late imperial China?
In this book, Francesca Bray explores subjects such as technology and ethics, technology and gendered subjectivities (both female and male), and technology and statecraft to illuminate how material settings and practices shaped topographies of everyday experience and ideologies of government, techniques of the self and technologies of the subject. Examining technologies ranging from ploughing and weaving to drawing pictures, building a house, prescribing medicine or composing a text, this book offers a rich insight into the interplay between the micro- and macro-politics of everyday life and the workings of governmentality in late imperial China, showing that gender principles were woven into the very fabric of empire, from cosmology and ideologies of rule to the material foundations of the state and the everyday practices of the domestic sphere.
This authoritative text will be welcomed by students and scholars of Chinese history, as well as those working on global history and
eBook
Rice : global networks and new histories
\"Global Networks and New Histories Rice today is food to half the world's population. Its history is inextricably entangled with the emergence of colonialism, the global networks of industrial capitalism, and the modern world economy. The history of rice is currently a vital and innovative field of research attracting serious attention, but no attempt has yet been made to write a history of rice and its place in the rise of capitalism from a global and comparative perspective. Rice is a first step toward such a history. The fifteen chapters, written by specialists on Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia, are premised on the utility of a truly international approach to history. Each one brings a new approach that unsettles prevailing narratives and suggests new connections. Together they cast new light on the significant roles of rice as crop, food, and commodity and shape historical trajectories and interregional linkages in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Gender and Technology
The praxis-oriented interdisciplinary field of feminist technology studies (FTS) has done most among the social sciences to build a vibrant and coherent school of gender and technology studies. Given their shared commitment to exploring emergent forms of power in the contemporary world, there is surprisingly little dialogue between FTS and mainstream cultural anthropology. This review begins by outlining FTS and its concepts and methods. I then turn to the anthropology of technology, which also offers useful conceptual frameworks and methods for exploring gender regimes. Then, to highlight the ideological and methodological contrasts between social and cultural analyses of technology and the implications for gender analysis, I discuss the treatment of technology in two leading theoretical fields in the cultural anthropology of modernity and globalization: the anthropology of technoscience, and material culture studies. I conclude by asking which forms of engagement might be envisaged between the fields.
Journal Article
Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia
This groundbreaking volume captures and analyzes the exhilarating and at times disorienting experience when scientists, government officials, educators, and the general public in East Asia tried to come to terms with the introduction of Western biological and medical sciences to the region. The nexus of gender and health is a compelling theme, for this is an area in which private lives and personal characteristics encounter the interventions of public policies. The nine empirically based studies by scholars of history of medicine, sociology, anthropology, and STS (science, technology, and society), spanning Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1870s to the present, demonstrate just how tightly concerns with gender and health have been woven into the enterprise of modernization and nation-building throughout the long twentieth century. The concepts of “gender” and “health” have become so commonly used that one might overlook that they are actually complicated notions with vexed histories even in their native contexts. Transposing such terminologies into another historical or geographical dimension is fraught with problems, and what makes the East Asian cases in this volume particularly illuminating is that they present concepts of gender and health in motion. The studies show how individuals and societies made sense of modern scientific discourses on diseases, body, sex, and reproduction, redefining existing terms in the process and adopting novel ideas to face new challenges and demands.
eBook
SHOT
The SHOT presidential address is presented. The Singapore of forty years ago has of course been transformed. Today it is wealthy, clean, orderly. A new, tidy hegemony of dominant languages prevails: the untidy buzz of regional Chinese languages has been replaced by two global languages, English and Mandarin Chinese. Singapore is still a crossroads, a trading zone, a polyglot, international hub whose success depends upon successful translation: translation between languages, between cultures, between histories, between regions, and between interests
Journal Article