ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Beyond Universalisms and Flat Pluralisms: East Asia as Method for the Global History of Science

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Are we writing global histories of science, or just global histories of Western science? Although the global turn has brought more non-Western participants into the ‘big picture,’ debates remain framed by an Anglophone canon of science studies, neglecting a rich legacy of non-Western theoretical voices. This results in a “flat” pluralism: one that celebrates hidden avenues of contribution while universalizing Western historiographies of ‘modern science.’

Yet since the nineteenth century at latest, East Asian thinkers have experimented with writing global histories and theories of science. These experiments grappled with regional revolutions, imperialisms, and communist-capitalist fractures wherein redefining “modern science” proved essential for questions of assimilation, autonomy, civilization, ethnicity, and nation. Sean Lei demonstrates how Yan Fu radically reinterpreted Huxley to create a historical model for transforming China into a “science-based civilization.” Xinyi Wen visits physician Tatsuno Kazuo, who reworked the magic-science transition in European history to develop a unified “Asian medicine” aligned with Japanese colonialism. Jaehwan Hyun examines how leftist Japanese scholars searching for an “alternative science” appropriated North Korean theories of acupuncture by means of dislocated postcolonial Koreans resident in Japan. Finally, Yasuhiro Okazawa shows that the 1985 Tsukuba Science Expo revived imperial epistemic visions under the guise of an ostensibly pluralist, anti-universalist science studies.

By revisiting these experiments, our panel contends that the “global turn” must become equally global in its historiographical and conceptual apparatuses. It must understand how the narration and theorization of science’s global history has proliferated for well over a century outside the West under varied political conditions, wherein diverse non-Western actors shaped alternate models of scientific pluralism and universalism on their own terms.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jung Lee, Ewha Womans University

Individual Presentations

• “Shatter the Mandala!”―the 1985 Tsukuba Science Expo and the Spectacle of Pluralist Dystopia - Yasuhiro Okazawa, Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University

• Adopting An Epistemic Challenge from the Periphery: The Rise and Fall of North Korea’s “Bonghan Theory” in 1960s–1970s Japan - Jaehwan Hyun, Hanyang University

• When Takeuchi Yoshimi Meets Michel Foucault: Shōkei Yakuriron, Doctrine of Signatures, and the Bifurcated ‘Practice Turn’ of Early Modern Europe - Xinyi Wen, Warburg Institute

• Constructing and Contesting the Science-Civilization Nexus in Late Qing China Tianyan Lun (On Heavenly Evolution) and the Debate on the Primacy of Technology over Science - Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Academia Sinica Taiwan

Session Organizer

• Hansun Hsiung, Durham University