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"Footbinding"
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The female man
'The Female Man' is the story of four women from parallel universes. Joanna's world is like our own, Jeannine's world is a poorer, grungier version and Janet comes from a world where men have died off. Lastly we meet Jael, warrior and assassin.
Book
Untold. Afong Moy
Afong Moy is believed to be the first Chinese woman to step foot on U.S. soil and her presence sparked an American fascination with Chinese culture, but her experience in the United States was far from welcoming.
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Footbinding and non-footbinding Han Chinese females in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 CE) Xifengbu cemetery: a skeletal and mortuary analysis
Footbinding was an infamous custom of the Han Chinese people used to modify the size and shape of feet in women. Binding started at a very young age and gradually deformed the natural growth of the feet, which was not only a painful process but also a lifetime source of inconvenience and morbidity. In this study, we report a large number of skeletons with signs of footbinding bones excavated from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 CE) Xifengbu cemetery, Shanxi Province, Northern China. Ninety-three female individuals at Xifengbu were found, of which 74 had footbinding while 19 were free of the tradition. Their age at death ranged from 13 years old to around 60 years old. Interestingly, all of the individuals also came from two feudal families over hundreds of years. All footbinding was identified by type as Talipes Calcaneus. Compared to the non-footbinding group at Xifengbu, the overall size and robustness of the leg bones of the footbinding group were smaller, indicating a weaker leg musculoskeletal system that affected locomotion and physical activities, as well as an increased risk of falls and injuries. Mortuary analysis indicated that footbinding females had a higher economic status than non-footbinding females. However, all non-footbinding females were found from joint burials, indicating their wife or concubine status and thus the acceptance of the non-footbinding during the time of prevalent footbinding in Qing Dynasty rural area. The findings will not only enrich our knowledge of the footbinding practice in ancient China but also shed light on how this gender-biased custom might have compromised health and quality of life for women. Additionally, the findings will show how footbinding may have determined opportunities to different lifestyles in the socioeconomic stratigraphy of the pre-modern male-dominant society in China.
Journal Article
Footbinding, Industrialization, and Evolutionary Explanation
The incorporation of niche construction theory (NCT) and epigenetics into an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) increases the explanatory power of evolutionary analyses of human history. NCT allows identification of distinct social inheritance and cultural inheritance and can thereby account for how an existing-but-dynamic social system yields variable influences across individuals and also how these individuals’ microlevel actions can feed back to alter the dynamic heterogeneously across time and space. An analysis of Chinese footbinding, as it was ending during the first half of the twentieth century and China was industrializing, illustrates the evolutionary dynamics of niche construction across inheritance tracks and explains regional heterogeneity as well as the persistence of a cultural belief that was socially inaccurate. Incorporating anthropological and sociological insights into an EES with NCT has the potential to proffer source laws for relationships between individual actions and macro-patterns in beliefs, structures, climate, and demography.
Journal Article
Footbinding, Industrialization, and Evolutionary Explanation
The incorporation of niche construction theory (NCT) and epigenetics into an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) increases the explanatory power of evolutionary analyses of human history. NCT allows identification of distinct social inheritance and cultural inheritance and can thereby account for how an existing-but-dynamic social system yields variable influences across individuals and also how these individuals' microlevel actions can feed back to alter the dynamic heterogeneously across time and space. An analysis of Chinese footbinding, as it was ending during the first half of the twentieth century and China was industrializing, illustrates the evolutionary dynamics of niche construction across inheritance tracks and explains regional heterogeneity as well as the persistence of a cultural belief that was socially inaccurate. Incorporating anthropological and sociological insights into an EES with NCT has the potential to proffer source laws for relationships between individual actions and macro-patterns in beliefs, structures, climate, and demography.
Journal Article
Foreword
Almost half a century has passed since Anglophone feminist scholars began to write about women in China's twentieth-century revolutions (Young 1973; Wolf and Witke 1975; Davin 1976; Croll 1978). Their inquiry quickly expanded beyond iconic images of women unbinding their feet, taking up the pen or the spear, and sallying forth to claim their place in a revolutionary modernity. Calling into question the late Qing/May Fourth images of Chinese women as sequestered and ignorant, scholars have examined the history of educated women and restored accounts of women's visible and invisible labour to late imperial and Republican history. They have explored the symbolic work that gender performed in passionate discussions about China's place in a world of predatory imperialist powers. They have posed questions about the Communist Party's conceptualisation of gender equality and the effects of Mao-era socialist construction on gendered life. And they have attempted to broaden their research beyond the events of high politics, asking how the understanding of social change would shift if viewed through the analytic lens of gender. These questions have generated a large body of scholarship, greatly enriched in recent decades by the work of gender scholars writing in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese mainland. All the while, China has been changing in a fast-moving and unevenly enacted process of economic reform, inspiring new questions and explorations across the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, literary and visual studies, politics, and of course gender studies. And yet, stubborn silences endure, some of them perhaps permanently. It remains difficult to grasp what happened when the everyday of gendered labour and social relations met the circulation of norms and imperatives for what women should do and be. How did a practice such as footbinding, once a part of the everyday, become a shameful form of child abuse, not just in the writings of intellectuals but in the memories of footbound women? How did the Maoist exhortation that \"women can hold up half the sky\" come to be a personally meaningful statement, a component of some women's sense of self? How, and for whom, did the changing symbolic language of gender come to infuse women's consciousness of their own capabilities, of what they might be expected to become or be admired for becoming, and how did this process affect individual and social identifications and desires?
Journal Article
Sociocultural Epistasis and Cultural Exaptation in Footbinding, Marriage Form, and Religious Practices in Early 20th-Century Taiwan
Social theorists have long recognized that changes in social order have cultural consequences but have not been able to provide an individual-level mechanism of such effects. Explanations of human behavior have only just begun to explore the different evolutionary dynamics of social and cultural inheritance. Here we provide ethnographic evidence of how cultural evolution, at the level of individuals, can be influenced by social evolution. Sociocultural epistasis—association of cultural ideas with the hierarchical structure of social roles—influences cultural change in unexpected ways. We document the existence of cultural exaptation, where a custom's origin was not due to acceptance of the later associated ideas. A cultural exaptation can develop in the absence of a cultural idea favoring it, or even in the presence of a cultural idea against it. Such associations indicate a potentially larger role for social evolutionary dynamics in explaining individual human behavior than previously anticipated.
Journal Article
Synergic mechanism and fabrication target for bipedal nanomotors
Inspired by the discovery of dimeric motor proteins capable of undergoing transportation in living cells, significant efforts have been expended recently to the fabrication of track-walking nanomotors possessing two foot-like components that each can bind or detach from an array of anchorage groups on the track in response to local events of reagent consumption. The central problem in fabricating bipedal nanomotors is how the motor as a whole can gain the synergic capacity of directional track-walking, given the fact that each pedal component alone often is incapable of any directional drift. Implemented bipedal motors to date solve this thermodynamically intricate problem by an intuitive strategy that requires a hetero-pedal motor, multiple anchorage species for the track, and multiple reagent species for motor operation. Here we performed realistic molecular mechanics calculations on molecule-scale models to identify a detailed molecular mechanism by which motor-level directionality arises from a homo-pedal motor along a minimally heterogeneous track. Optimally, the operation may be reduced to a random supply of a single species of reagents to allow the motor's autonomous functioning. The mechanism suggests a distinct class of fabrication targets of drastically reduced system requirements. Intriguingly, a defective form of the mechanism falls into the realm of the well known Brownian motor mechanism, yet distinct features emerge from the normal working of the mechanism.
Journal Article