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Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770-1839

Thomas Irvine

From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800. These sounds were gathered by diplomats, ... More

From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800. These sounds were gathered by diplomats, trade officials, missionaries, and other travelers and transmitted back to Europe, where they were reconstructed in the imaginations of writers, philosophers, and music historians such as Jean-Philippe Rameau, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and Charles Burney. Thomas Irvine gathers these stories in Listening to China, exploring how the sonic encounter with China shaped perceptions of Europe’s own musical development. Through these stories, Irvine not only investigates how the Sino-Western encounter sounded, but also traces the West’s shifting response to China. As the trading relationships between China and the West broke down, travelers and music theorists abandoned the vision of shared musical approaches, focusing instead on China’s noisiness and sonic disorder and finding less to like in its music. At the same time, Irvine reconsiders the idea of a specifically Western music history, revealing that it was comparison with China, the great “other,” that helped this idea emerge. Ultimately, Irvine draws attention to the ways Western ears were implicated in the colonial and imperial project in China, as well as to China’s importance to the construction of musical knowledge during and after the European Enlightenment. Timely and original, Listening to China is a must-read for music scholars and historians of China alike.Less

Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America

Dael A. Norwood

From the founding of the republic, Americans have made China their business. Trading Freedom investigates how this commercial connection shaped the early United States. Its core contention is that ... More

From the founding of the republic, Americans have made China their business. Trading Freedom investigates how this commercial connection shaped the early United States. Its core contention is that the conflicts that defined the first century of US politics and statecraft – over sovereignty and slavery, free labor and immigration, economic development and imperial expansion – were all profoundly affected by Americans’ China trade. The book begins in the 1780s with the opening of a free passage of goods and people between the American republic and the Qing empire, and closes in the Gilded Age, when policymakers ended this free-flowing traffic. This commerce was about more than filling teacups or stuffing opium pipes (though it was that, too). The demands of China’s markets took Americans around the world in search of silver specie and rare commodities, involving them in complex circuits moving capital, goods, and human labor from Boston to Batavia and Shanghai to San Francisco, and nearly everywhere in between. Traders’ profits depended on the navigation of credit networks and international diplomacy as much as the management of ships and sail. The China trade put Americans into direct contact with a vast array of new peoples and places, and at critical moments it inspired policymakers to consider domestic problems from a global perspective. Recovering the critical role commercial connections to China played in the US’s development, Trading Freedom reveals how a global outlook on political economy has structured Americans’ relations with each other, and the world, from the beginning.Less

Geocultural Power: China's Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century

Tim Winter

China’s Belt and Road Initiative aims to connect continents and integrate Eurasia via a multitude of collaborations spanning trade and infrastructure, culture and finance. Launched in 2013, it ... More

China’s Belt and Road Initiative aims to connect continents and integrate Eurasia via a multitude of collaborations spanning trade and infrastructure, culture and finance. Launched in 2013, it incorporates more than sixty countries and two-thirds of the world’s population. But what does it mean to revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century? Built around the concept of heritage diplomacy, Geocultural Power explores this question, arguing that through the Silk Roads China is reviving a theater of geopolitics and great power accumulation, and the idea of a harmonious Asia that prospers from international trade and cross-cultural dialogue. Until now Belt and Road has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. This book introduces geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Through the Silk Roads of the twenty-first century China becomes the new author of Eurasian history, and the architect of the bridge between East and West. Belt and Road bundles geopolitical ambition and infrastructure with a carefully curated shared heritage to produce a grand narrative of transcontinental connectivity: past, present and future. Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century makes a major contribution to our understanding of the uses of history and culture, and offers a unique reading of an initiative that will influence world affairs for years to come. It will be of interest to those working in world and regional history, international relations and diplomacy studies, heritage and museum studies, globalization, archaeology and Asian studies more broadly.Less

"Red Revolution, Green Revolution": Scientific Farming in Socialist China

Sigrid Schmalzer

In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term "green revolution" to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger and so forestall the spread of more "red revolutions" ... More

In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term "green revolution" to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger and so forestall the spread of more "red revolutions" around the globe. In China, however, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In contrast with the technocratic vision of American agricultural science and foreign policy, the dominant position in socialist China was that science could not be divorced from politics, and modernization could not be separated from revolution. The goal of this book is to bring into view China's unique intersection of red and green revolutions through the experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and "educated youth." The history of what in China was called "scientific farming" offers a unique opportunity not only to explore the environmental and social consequences of modern agricultural technologies, but also to develop a critique of the fundamental assumptions about science and society that undergirded the green revolution, and ultimately to radically reposition science in social and political terms. The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere on the planet. However, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for ongoing anti-capitalist, decolonialist, and environmentalist struggles to confront problems of hunger and sustainability in appropriately social and political ways.Less

The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China

Emily Baum

This book traces a genealogy of madness in China from the turn of the twentieth century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was ... More

This book traces a genealogy of madness in China from the turn of the twentieth century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.” Throughout most of history, the insane in China were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of the condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas, vocabularies, and institutions gradually began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. Although many of these ideas were introduced to China from abroad, they were not retained wholesale; instead, psychiatric concepts were often changed, reinterpreted, and redeployed in ways that were unique to urban China at this particular historical moment. Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries, the police, asylum workers, and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, the book argues, were not just imposed onto the Beijing public but continuously “invented” by a range of actors in ways that reflected their own needs and interests.Less

Learning from Shenzhen: China's Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City

Mary Ann O'Donnell, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach (eds)

Since 1980, the ongoing transformation of rural Bao’an County into Shenzhen Municipality has symbolized and constituted the frontier for China’s post-Mao transition, serving as a model for the ... More

Since 1980, the ongoing transformation of rural Bao’an County into Shenzhen Municipality has symbolized and constituted the frontier for China’s post-Mao transition, serving as a model for the country’s urban future. Yet outside China, many have overlooked or dismissed Shenzhen’s importance to domestic and global transformation, even as the city came to dominate contemporary global manufacturing and now sets its sights on becoming one of the world’s largest startup hubs. This multidisciplinary volume brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive approach to Shenzhen from the perspectives of social history, urban history, and urban anthropology, addressing topics in public health, labor, architecture, planning, infrastructure, creative industry, gender, politics, and education. The authors offer a situated account of China's socialist transition from the ground up, exploring how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logics led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city. In doing so, the authors bring the extensive literature of China studies into dialogue with urban studies and its recent rethinking of the “spatial turn” that has come to define the field. Methodologically, the volume offers the general and expert reader alike a broad and interdisciplinary scope of study supported by up-to-date fieldwork. This collective history of one of the world's most dynamic cities contributes to the multidisciplinary interest in the urban case study as the site of critical problems and possibilities in contemporary China and beyond.Less

Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire

Yukiko Koga

Inheritance of Loss explores how contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that happened decades ago, and how descendants of perpetrators and ... More

Inheritance of Loss explores how contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that happened decades ago, and how descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy. Approaching these questions through the lens of inheritance, rather than memory, it focuses on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism while inviting former colonial industries to invest, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II. This book explores how long neglected colonial remnants are transformed into newly minted capital through the rhetoric of “inheritance.” It chronicles sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate entangled attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. It identifies the political economy of redemption as a new mode of generational transmission of the past that makes visible the entangled processes of “after empire,” which points to the often invisible, displaced, or seemingly separate postcolonial and postimperial processes that shape the afterlife of losses and their redemptions, to envisioning present and future relations to what remains, and to renewed desires for going after empire. Inheritance of Loss shows how structures of violence and injustice after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.Less

The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures

Justin M. Jacobs

This book provides a new interpretive framework for Western archaeological expeditions along the Silk Road in northwestern China during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By placing ... More

This book provides a new interpretive framework for Western archaeological expeditions along the Silk Road in northwestern China during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Sven Hedin, and other explorers back within the original political, economic, cultural, and intellectual contexts of the late Qing and early Republican eras, the author challenges the longstanding assumption that coercion, deceit, and corruption were responsible for allowing Western archaeologists to remove so many cultural relics from China. This study concludes that the majority of people who interacted with the Western archaeologist in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia made the conscious and willing decision to aid and abet his expedition in exchange for various forms of capital that were perceived to be of greater value than the objects he removed. In the decades after the 1911 revolution and World War I, however, the value of these compensations began to decrease as the value of the artifacts targeted by the archaeologist increased. As a result, a new generation of Westernized Chinese scholars began to criminalize the prior activities of Western archaeologists, who could no longer offer a form of compensation that exceeded the now priceless valuation projected onto the artifact within the newly imagined Chinese nation. This process of criminalization also played an influential role in formulating new ideas about cultural sovereignty that are still debated today.Less

Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

This book aims to answer one question: How was Chinese medicine transformed from an antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol for China’s exploration of its own ... More

This book aims to answer one question: How was Chinese medicine transformed from an antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol for China’s exploration of its own modernity half a century later? Instead of viewing this transition as a derivative of the political history of modern China, it argues that China's medical history had a life of its own and at times even influenced the ideological struggle over the definition of China’s modernity and the Chinese state. Far from being a “remnant” of pre-modern China, Chinese medicine in the twentieth century co-evolved with Western medicine and the Nationalist state, undergoing a profound transformation—institutionally, epistemologically, and materially—that resulted in the creation of a modern Chinese medicine. Nevertheless, this newly re-assembled modern Chinese medicine was stigmatized by its opponents at that time as a mongrel form of medicine that was “neither donkey nor horse,” because the discourse of modernity rejected the possibility of productive crossbreeding between the modern and the traditional. Against the hegemony of this discourse, the definitive feature of this new medicine was the fact that it took the discourse of modernity (and the accompanying knowledge of biomedicine) seriously but survived the resulting epistemic violence by way of negotiation and self-innovation. In this sense, the historic rise of this “neither donkey nor horse” medicine constitutes a local innovation of crucial importance for the notion of China’s modernity, challenging us to imagine different kinds of relationships between science and non-Western knowledge traditions.Less

Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China's Borderlands

Judd C. Kinzley

This work offers a new resource-centered history of modern Xinjiang. The region, located on China's farthest western border, was shaped in the 20th century by not only Chinese officials, but also ... More

This work offers a new resource-centered history of modern Xinjiang. The region, located on China's farthest western border, was shaped in the 20th century by not only Chinese officials, but also foreign powers, international markets, and autonomous local officials, each of whom were eager to stake their own claim to Xinjiang's rich resource wealth. Hoping to quickly and inexpensively exploit these resources, these various actors frequently built atop the efforts of their predecessors. This work reveals a new, transnational "layered" model of state formation that can be applied beyond Xinjiang to various Chinese border regions, including Manchuria, Taiwan, and Tibet. The larger framework can also apply beyond China, to contested, resource-rich border regions across the global south.Less

Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China

When Adolf Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and ... More

When Adolf Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and short stories composed by these refugees in the years after they landed in China, this book fills a gap in our historical understanding of what happened to so many Jews who were forced to board the first ship bound for anywhere. Once they arrived, the refugees learned to navigate the various languages, belief systems, and ethnic traditions they encountered in an already booming international city, and faced challenges within their own community based on disparities in socioeconomic status, levels of religious observance, urban or rural origin, and philosophical differences. Recovered from archives, private collections, and now-defunct newspapers, these accounts make their English-language debut in this volume.Less

Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China

Erik Mueggler

Death has become the central salient topic in many parts of rural China. Transformations in economic life, social structure, political ideology, and spiritual aspirations have occurred at dizzying ... More

Death has become the central salient topic in many parts of rural China. Transformations in economic life, social structure, political ideology, and spiritual aspirations have occurred at dizzying speed. The socialist rituals that once gave people narrative structures to comprehend historical change have disappeared. Elderly people have lived through repeated radical social transformations from the socialist revolution forward: their deaths are now the sole site where these events can be reprised and evaluated. These deaths are opportunities to reassess how individual lives articulate with history, what social persons are, and what they might become. Practices of death are at the center of relations with a population that socialism disregarded: immaterial animate beings like ancestors, ghosts, and spirits. Death frames historical time with questions of embodiment and disembodiment: of the materialization of immaterial beings in bodies, effigies, and stones, and their dematerialization through fire, consumption, or corruption. This book investigates death in a mountain community in Yunnan Province, where Lòlop’ò people, officially Yi, speak a Tibeto-Burman language called Lòloŋo and are heir to an extraordinary range of resources for working on the dead: techniques to give the dead material form; exchanges to give substance to relations among the living and with the dead; laments and ritual chants used to communicate with the dead. Ultimately the aim of the book is to understand the questions Lòlop’ò ask and answer about these mysterious others at the center of their social world.Less

The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

Kate Merkel-Hess

The Chinese Communist Party has often been credited with recognizing the revolutionary potential of a mobilized peasantry. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s the Communists were not the only Chinese who ... More

The Chinese Communist Party has often been credited with recognizing the revolutionary potential of a mobilized peasantry. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s the Communists were not the only Chinese who believed that their nation’s future lay in its villages rather than in its cities. These other reformers, a loose coalition of “rural reconstruction” advocates, argued that the countryside could be made modern through the mobilization of rural people, but they rejected the Communist belief in violent revolution. Incredibly influential in the interwar years but now largely forgotten, rural reconstruction reformers embraced the ideas of scientific progress and cosmopolitan culture but disputed the city’s monopoly on modernity. Incorporating ideas from a variety of similar efforts from Ireland to India, Chinese rural reformers ranged from Confucian to Christian in their ideological commitments and attempted to preserve the vitality and social coherence of rural communities by undertaking everything from literacy education to theater modernization to agricultural outreach. Despite their prominence and widespread efforts, rural reconstruction failed to generate national change. As this book traces, much of that failure was the result of reformers’ willingness to relinquish their early messages of peasant self-transformation and self-sufficiency in order to cooperate with the Nationalist government. Nevertheless, rural reconstruction created a lasting political vision of a remade countryside and an educated, mobilized rural population that not only helped lay the groundwork for the Communist Revolution of 1949 but continues to inspire advocates for rural people and communities in China today.Less

Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys

Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper

In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city's status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city ... More

In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city's status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. This book is a tour of the city's postcolonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography. This book's point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By blending ethnographic and visual approaches, this book offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.Less

Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang

Tom Cliff

The experience of being Han in Xinjiang is part of the broader experience of migration and frontier settlement in PRC-era China. Drawing on analysis of history, biography, and social structure, Oil ... More

The experience of being Han in Xinjiang is part of the broader experience of migration and frontier settlement in PRC-era China. Drawing on analysis of history, biography, and social structure, Oil and Water dispels the notion that Han settlers in Xinjiang are homogenous, or that their interests necessarily align with those of the state. The book argues that it is more by default than by their own design that Han in Xinjiang are colonists, although colonists they are. Each of the core chapters has a strong biographical element, and is concerned with how formal and informal structures, agency, and chance interact to shape lives. Each chapter also focuses on one or more of the classic topics of sociological studies of China, including urbanization, the socialist-style work unit (danwei), state discourses and collective memory, social connections (guanxi), marriage and the family, and mass protest. From this socially-grounded and ethnographic perspective, the book illuminates key aspects of the relationship between China’s core area and Xinjiang-as-periphery. The “uncivilized periphery” remains essential to China’s national identity, and an integral part of Han settlers’ psychology. The frontier has been seen throughout history as simultaneously a place of exile and a place where liberation is possible, and that continues to be the case. Indeed, the search for freedom–of many different kinds–is what drives migration in contemporary times. Colonialism may be a metropolitan project, and somewhat abstract to elites in the metropole, but it is the superstructure of life for those on the periphery.Less

Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China's Mountain South

Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai

In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create ... More

In the early 2000s, the government of China encouraged the nation’s 55 registered minority nationalities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” ethnic medical knowledge in an effort to create health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of state-led knowledge development while appreciating local therapeutic practices scattered through rural southern China. The nationalities highlighted are the Achang, Li, Lisu, Qiang, Tujia, Yao, and Zhuang groups. Chapter 1 focuses ethnographically on grass-roots institution-building, and recounts the short but rich history of some relatively successful institutions of nationality medicine. In Chapter 2, medical knowledge sorted into textbooks is shown to result from survey and conceptual work by scholar-activists, and certain openings of formal knowledge to wild expertise and folk authority are noted. Chapter 3 turns to embodiment, reading through textbooks, an explanatory sketch, and the hands-on techniques of local practitioners to discern specific bodies and herbal agents. Herbals are the central topic of Chapter 4, which tracks the love life of humans and plants, and explores other intimacies between human healers and their favored forest products. Chapter 5 dwells on a series of encounters between state agents and nationality healers as well as between official knowledge and earthbound lore, survey researchers and local activists, and anthropologists and their allies and interlocutors. This study draws inspiration from philosophers ranging from Heidegger to Zhuangzi, Deleuze to Mao Zedong, but above all it attends to local knowledge in China’s mountain south.Less

Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism

Joyce Mao

This book examines the influence of U.S.-China relations upon the evolution of conservatism in postwar America. After the Chinese civil war concluded in 1949, the right formulated an “Asia First” ... More

This book examines the influence of U.S.-China relations upon the evolution of conservatism in postwar America. After the Chinese civil war concluded in 1949, the right formulated an “Asia First” approach to the challenge of global communism, one that demanded U.S. foreign policy give the Pacific equal or more consideration than the Atlantic and prioritize the cause of an allied China. It is argued that a combination of anti-communist orientalism and nostalgia for a special U.S.-China relationship allowed conservatives to critique policies of postwar consensus and renovate their ideology for the Cold War in the process. On the diplomatic front, Asia First offered conservatives a geopolitical issue to mark as their own, and their positions on issues like the Korean War and Taiwan Straits Crises laid foundations for a diplomatic ethos that is today so familiar. Hostility toward the United Nations, assertion of American sovereignty in diplomatic affairs, and the promotion of a technological defense state all owe a great deal to Asia First internationalism. At home, conservative politicians used the doctrine to better their fortunes among a changing electorate. They continually invoked the “loss” of China to illuminate what they saw as the corrosion of traditional values, namely strict anti-communism and a commitment to the Open Door. As an issue and as an ideal, China helped to bridge the divide between key GOP elites and pro-Chiang activists at the grassroots level. The result was a long-term working relationship that catalyzed the modern conservative movement.Less

Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism

Nan Enstad

Too often, notions of capitalist change rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. ... More

Too often, notions of capitalist change rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. Cigarettes Inc. offers an intimate cultural history that upends this story, revealing the myriad cross-cultural encounters that produced all levels of corporate life prior to World War II. In this startling new account of corporate innovation and expansion, this book uncovers a corporate network rooted in Jim Crow segregation that stretched between the United States and China. Hundreds of white southerners, bright leaf tobacco, cigarettes, and industry expertise flowed through this multinational network. Cigarettes, Inc. teems with a global cast—from Egyptian, American, and Chinese entrepreneurs to a multiracial set of farmers, merchants, factory workers, marketers, and even baseball players, jazz musicians, and sex workers. Through their stories, Cigarettes, Inc. newly accounts for the cigarette’s spectacular rise in popularity and in the process offers nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of the corporation and its relationship to empire.Less

Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China

Grace Yen Shen

Unearthing the Nation uses the development of modern geology to explore the complex relationship between science and nationalism in Republican China. While social commentators of the time could link ... More

Unearthing the Nation uses the development of modern geology to explore the complex relationship between science and nationalism in Republican China. While social commentators of the time could link science, modernization and national empowerment in abstract terms, Chinese scientists had to grapple with the practical consequences of using universalizing foreign systems to address local realities and needs. In particular they faced two ongoing challenges in “saving China” (jiuguo) through science: how to develop “objective”, internationally recognized scientific authority without effacing native identity, and how to serve China when “China” was still searching for a stable national form? In tackling these issues, this book challenges the questions we ask and the explanations we accept when we try to understand scientific modernity in non-Anglo-European contexts. Rather than taking Chinese moves towards science as the lumbering of a giant, unable to react nimbly to its new environment, this study portrays the development of the Chinese geological community as a series of gambles aimed at pushing the limits of the game and reimagining the prizes to be won. These ventures into modern geology reveal both the contours of international science as a world system in the early 20th century and the transformative effect of everyday scientific practices on individual practitioners. Though national identity is at the center of the story, it is an emerging phenomenon, not a final cause, and, through their engagement with geology, Chinese scientists rendered their nation visible in unexpected ways to both themselves and interested outsiders.Less

Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality

David A. Palmer and Elijah Siegler

The practices of Daoism – China’s indigenous religion – have become increasingly popular in the West over the past decades. But what does the Americanized “Tao” of healing, health, energy, sex and ... More

The practices of Daoism – China’s indigenous religion – have become increasingly popular in the West over the past decades. But what does the Americanized “Tao” of healing, health, energy, sex and alchemical spirituality have to do with the ancient monastic tradition as it is practiced in China? Dream Trippers follows American spiritual tourists, practitioners and scholars as they journey to the land of Daoism’s birth, at the monasteries and caves of Huashan, one of China’s most sacred peaks. The book captures the encounters between them and the Chinese monks and hermits who host them and attempt to teach them the “true Dao,” as they interact with each other in obtuse, often humorous, and sometimes enlightening and transformative ways. At stake is the predicament of a globalized spirituality that wavers between an elusive traditional authenticity and a fragile individual autonomy. Dream Trippers untangles the anxieties, confusions, and ambiguities that arise as the Chinese and American practitioners attempt to work through the tensions between cosmological attunement and radical spiritual individualism.Less