The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China by Dagmar Schäfer

The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China



Download The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China




The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China Dagmar Schäfer
Language: English
Page: 353
Format: pdf
ISBN: 0226735842, 9780226735849
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press

 “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things is a richly textured study of knowledge in the making, seen through the life and thought of Song Yingxing, a seventeenth-century philosophical iconoclast whose study of technologies laid out a radical view of cosmological processes and their relation to human nature. Dagmar Schäfer offers a provocative and convincing portrait of a maverick but comprehensive thinker who, in the white heat of indignation provoked by a political scandal, wove a complex and coherent theory of cosmic process and human action into a set of arresting texts on the heavens, on human crafts, on sound, on politics, and ethics, all inextricably commingled in Chinese natural philosophy. This brilliant book will be attractive and accessible to students and scholars in the cultural history of science and technology, in intellectual history, and in world history, as well as in Chinese studies.”

(Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh )

“When it was first rediscovered in Japan early last century, modernist Japanese, Chinese, and Euro-American scholars hastily assimilated Song Yingxing’s Tiangong kaiwu to the accruing literature on the allegedly ill-fated history of science and technology in late imperial China. They framed an overdetermined view of Song’s accomplishments in light of the failure of China to develop ‘modern science.’ This simple-minded teleology has now been challenged by Dagmar Schäfer. Schäfer contextualizes Song’s so-called magnum opus by placing this longest and most prominent of Song’s works alongside his other writings, and reenacts for us the culturally embedded practices that informed Song Yingxing’s career of knowledge-making in a time of precocious commercialization and commoditization in Ming China.”

(Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University )

“Dagmar Schäfer uses the remarkable work of the Ming scholar and minor official Song Yingxing to bring together the philosophical values of tradition and innovation among the Ming intellectual elite with the material culture of jade, silk, farming, and many other crafts. She is sensitive to all the registers of these objects: how they were processed, made, and marketed; their role in determining status in a steeply but subtly graded hierarchy; the economics of their manufacture and sale; the symbolic and philosophical uses to which they were put. In her hands, Song’s idiosyncratic cosmology becomes a lens through which to see Ming theoretical and practical culture in a new light.”

(Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin )

“An erudite, nuanced, and groundbreaking contribution to the study of science and technology in early modern China. Highly recommended.”



 

(H. Doss Choice )

“[A] brilliant and subtle investigation of the philosophy of technology in early modern China.” (Peter C. Perdue Technology and Culture )

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