ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

GRAPHICS AND TEXT TWENTY YEAR LATER-1: Patterns, Charts And Maps For The State

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Almost twenty years ago, Francesca Bray co-edited, with V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann and G. Métailié, Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China. The Warp and the Weft (Leiden, 2007). The goal of the book was to “focus on tu 圖, technical images, and on their relationship with written text in the production of technical knowledge.” The book represented the first systematic attempt to examine the part played by visual entities in the context of knowledge activities in China. This symposium, organised in honour of Francesca Bray, aims to present new developments in our knowledge of this topic as well as to consider what we could gain from broadening our focus to include East Asia and beyond. One of its goals is to clarify how, along history, actors perceived the diversity of graphical forms produced in relation to knowledge activities. We are also interested in categories used by actors to classify the diagrammatic and figurative elements they employed in the context of the local knowledge cultures in which they participated. We want to pay attention to the practices that actors put into play for producing and for using these diagrammatic and figurative elements.
The first session of the symposium focuses on the kinds of patterns, charts, and maps used in relation to texts in the context of various types of state activities. The first two contributions deal with the shaping of graphical devices that played a key role in early imperial China in aligning the state with the cosmos and the body symbolically. They both rely on new documents, which were not yet brought to bear on this issue. By contrast, the last two contributions deal with the use of all kinds of graphical and textual elements in combination, to fulfil managerial tasks that were central to the state. The first of them focuses on the Chinese state’s management of the river control, while the second one deals with how the Korean state used geographical knowledge as a tool of governance.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Matteo Valleriani, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Individual Presentations

• Number and Color in the Formation of Correlative Thought in Ancient China - Donald Harper, University of Chicago

• Spatial and Temporal Mappings of the Heavens: Moving Spirits, the Heavens in the Body and Mind-Body Dualism - Lisa Raphals, University of Edinburgh and University of California Riverside

• Making Sense of Illustrations and Maps Related to River Control in Late Imperial China - Iwo Amelung, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

• Image-Text Relations in Kim Jeongho’s Geography of Nineteenth-Century Korea - Jongtae Lim, Seoul National University

Session Organizer

• Karine C. C. Chemla, University of Edinburgh and SPHERE, CNRS-UPC