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This volume provides a history of how “the human” has been constituted as a subject of scientific inquiry in China from the seventeenth century to the present.
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward "science" and "objectivity" but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the "Harvard complex" played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.
In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man. After the communist revolution of 1949, Peking Man became a prominent figure in the movement to bring science to the people. In a new state with twin goals of crushing “superstition” and establishing a socialist society, the story of human evolution was the first lesson in Marxist philosophy offered to the masses. At the same time, even Mao’s populist commitment to mass participation in science failed to account for the power of popular culture—represented most strikingly in legends about the Bigfoot-like Wild Man—to reshape ideas about human nature. The People’s Peking Man is a skilled social history of twentieth-century Chinese paleoanthropology and a compelling cultural—and at times comparative—history of assumptions and debates about what it means to be human. By focusing on issues that push against the boundaries of science and politics, The People’s Peking Man offers an innovative approach to modern Chinese history and the history of science.
This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself.
In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals came to realize that Westerners surpassed them not only in knowledge of the world, but also in knowledge of China itself. A rising generation of Chinese scientists, engineers, and administrators was eager to address this state of affairs and began to retrace the footsteps of Western explorers who had crisscrossed China during the preceding century. The nine case studies assembled in this book show how a new cohort of professional Chinese explorers traveled, studied, appropriated, and reshaped national space from the 1920s to the 1950s. In some instances, the explorers drew directly from the fieldwork practices of their Western predecessors. In others, they trained compilers to collect and systematize local knowledge that could be passed up the administrative hierarchy to government and national institutions. Their projects helped to claim natural resources, prepare for infrastructural development, and create new institutionalized knowledge and public engagement with textual representations of China’s geobody. This book elucidates the ways in which knowledge production in early twentieth-century China centered on space and contributed to China’s transformation into a modern nation-state.
Following on the previous volume, Mental Health in Asia and the Pacific, which was co-edited with Milton Lewis, this book explores historical and contemporary developments in mental health in China and Chinese immigrant populations. It presents the development of mental health policies and services from the 19th Century until the present time, offering a clear view of the antecedents of today’s policies and practice. Chapters focus on traditional Chinese conceptions of mental illness, the development of the Chinese mental health system through the massive political, social, cultural and economic transformations in China from the late 19th Century to the present, and the mental health of Chinese immigrants in several countries with large Chinese populations. China’s international political and economic influence and its capabilities in mental health science and innovation have grown rapidly in recent decades. So has China’s engagement in international institutions, and in global economic and health development activities. Chinese immigrant communities are to be found in almost all countries all around the world. Readers of this book will gain an understanding of how historical, cultural, economic, social, and political contexts have influenced the development of mental health law, policies and services in China and how these contexts in migrant receiving countries shape the mental health of Chinese immigrants.
In Making the New World Their Own, Qiong Zhang offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars in the late Ming and early Qing came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits. These encounters formed a fascinating chapter in the early modern global integration of space. It unfolded as a series of mutually constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and world geography to classical studies. Zhang demonstrates how scholars such as Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit ideas to rediscover China’s place in the world and reconstitute their classical tradition. Winner of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) "2015 Academic Excellence Award"
As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.
The current social reality and changing global forces and spaces are inspiring the rethinking, refining, and re-empowering of the world social sciences to broach the frontiers of human knowledge, enhance mutual understanding across cultures and civilizations, and shape a better world. Taking Tsinghua University’s sociology as a case, this book concentrates on how internationalization shapes disciplinary development in a global context of asymmetrical academic relations. This inquiry is set amidst China’s dramatic economic, social, political, and cultural transformations, as well as the institutional reforms in this Chinese flagship university. This book seeks to probe how Chinese and Western knowledge, institutions, and cultures are integrated in the ongoing process of internationalization and concentrates on the disciplinary evolution of Tsinghua’s sociology—intellectually, institutionally, and culturally—drawing on top-down higher education policy and bottom-up perceptions and experiences of Tsinghua’s social scientists. This book highlights that higher education internationalization is an evolving process whose advanced phase would require Chinese social scientists to bring China to the world. It is time for Tsinghua University to reassess the long-term impact of internationalization on its academic disciplines and provide sufficient support for the development of the social sciences.This book will attract academics, practitioners, and postgraduate students interested in higher education internationalization, international academic relations, global constellation and distribution of academic power, academic knowledge production, and the development and intellectual influences of the Chinese social sciences.