Pub Date : 2022-06-14DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2022.2075664
Moe Nakazora
Abstract Bioprospecting refers to the scientific investigation of plants and folk medicines in the hope of developing new drugs. Its 1980s revival raised concerns about the intellectual property of indigenous people, requiring bioprospecting scientists to make legitimate benefit-sharing agreements with resource owners and communities. Despite the “ethical” look of such a movement, it has been criticized as a new form of “biocapitalism.” This is especially true in India, where the government has initiated databases of “valuable” traditional medicine, such as Ayurveda, and criticism has been directed at the way the complex composition of Ayurveda was disentangled and reorganized into elementary botanical units commensurate with the global pharmaceutical industry. This paper explores the politics embedded in the material-semiotic process of databasing Ayurveda and herbal plants. Focusing on a state government project in Uttarakhand, India, the study reveals how the project relies on colonial herbal relations while generating new and unexpected relations among particular medicinal plants (jadi buti), folk Ayurvedic healers (vaidyas), and local plant taxonomists. This study highlights the necessity of grasping the emergent biodiversity databasing initiatives in India as “experiments,” open-ended, uncertain, and indeterminate projects rather than part of a universal process of pharmaceuticalization.
{"title":"Database as an Experiment: Parataxonomy of Medicinal Plants as Intellectual Property in India","authors":"Moe Nakazora","doi":"10.1080/18752160.2022.2075664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/18752160.2022.2075664","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Bioprospecting refers to the scientific investigation of plants and folk medicines in the hope of developing new drugs. Its 1980s revival raised concerns about the intellectual property of indigenous people, requiring bioprospecting scientists to make legitimate benefit-sharing agreements with resource owners and communities. Despite the “ethical” look of such a movement, it has been criticized as a new form of “biocapitalism.” This is especially true in India, where the government has initiated databases of “valuable” traditional medicine, such as Ayurveda, and criticism has been directed at the way the complex composition of Ayurveda was disentangled and reorganized into elementary botanical units commensurate with the global pharmaceutical industry. This paper explores the politics embedded in the material-semiotic process of databasing Ayurveda and herbal plants. Focusing on a state government project in Uttarakhand, India, the study reveals how the project relies on colonial herbal relations while generating new and unexpected relations among particular medicinal plants (jadi buti), folk Ayurvedic healers (vaidyas), and local plant taxonomists. This study highlights the necessity of grasping the emergent biodiversity databasing initiatives in India as “experiments,” open-ended, uncertain, and indeterminate projects rather than part of a universal process of pharmaceuticalization.","PeriodicalId":45255,"journal":{"name":"East Asian Science Technology and Society-An International Journal","volume":"37 1","pages":"50 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83008312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-16DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2022.2055907
P. O. Nadh
Abstract This article examines how political economic transitions in India have shaped the trajectory of the biotech sector. With the increasing global prominence of biotechnology as a potential tool for economic growth, the Indian state also started prioritizing it. However, under the economic reforms that were initiated starting from the early 1980s, such growth is envisaged through encouraging private sector and public--private partnerships (PPP) while weakening the public sector units (PSU). Employing a political economy framework, we analyze three initiatives, namely Bharat Immunological and Biological Corporation Limited a PSU and Genomed, The Centre for Genomic Applications under PPP model established as first of its kind ventures. Our analysis shows that the PSU established with the mandate of production of affordable vaccines deviated from this role and became a part of the global value chain of vaccine market controlled by the Trans National Corporations. Similarly, the public--private initiatives have been appropriated to cater to the goals of private enterprises at the cost of public resources.
{"title":"India’s Biotech Emergence: A Critical Political Economy Analysis","authors":"P. O. Nadh","doi":"10.1080/18752160.2022.2055907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/18752160.2022.2055907","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how political economic transitions in India have shaped the trajectory of the biotech sector. With the increasing global prominence of biotechnology as a potential tool for economic growth, the Indian state also started prioritizing it. However, under the economic reforms that were initiated starting from the early 1980s, such growth is envisaged through encouraging private sector and public--private partnerships (PPP) while weakening the public sector units (PSU). Employing a political economy framework, we analyze three initiatives, namely Bharat Immunological and Biological Corporation Limited a PSU and Genomed, The Centre for Genomic Applications under PPP model established as first of its kind ventures. Our analysis shows that the PSU established with the mandate of production of affordable vaccines deviated from this role and became a part of the global value chain of vaccine market controlled by the Trans National Corporations. Similarly, the public--private initiatives have been appropriated to cater to the goals of private enterprises at the cost of public resources.","PeriodicalId":45255,"journal":{"name":"East Asian Science Technology and Society-An International Journal","volume":"52 1","pages":"34 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88518888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2022.2069952
H. Por
From the temple murals in Bagan to the church fresco in Europe, visualization has been a vehicle of managing public health since time immemorial and it has a vital place in the governance of the current pandemic too. As importantly, governance is a field of actions, practices and activities, of which visualization constitutes a significant part, carried out by state and non-state actors, health professionals and lay persons, with the aim to directly or indirectly improve the management of pandemic. In other words, the governance of covid-19 is not monopolized by state actors and health professionals. Community and civil society too play as significant a part. Meanwhile, the general public are not merely targets of governance. As indicated in many parts of the world in the current pandemic, the general public are also actors who actively participate in governing and overseeing the conduct of their counterparts. Even though pandemic visualization is a general trend globally, each country has its idiosyncrasies. Two years into the pandemic, Malaysia has gone through several waves of covid-19, with the latest one associated with the highly transmissible Omicron variant, and three rounds of nationwide lockdown since 2020. This essay is an exploratory attempt to capture and contemplate pandemic visualizing in Malaysia, while covid-19 outbreak is still unfolding. As a tool of governance, covid-19 visualization comes in various forms, including projection model, mapping, body marking, photographic representation and visual narratives. One form often prevails over the other as the pandemic evolves and new situation arises. More importantly, images of pandemic contain more than evidentiary character. This essay views pandemic images not merely as objects that reflect truths and facts, but as intermediaries that are endowed with meanings, while being deployed to communicate certain social perspectives, construct certain ideas of medicine and science, and structure the way (s) audience see reality (Cooter & Stein 2010; Engelmann 2018; Ehring 1994; Hattori 2011; Imada 2017; Jordanova 1990).
{"title":"Visualization and Pandemic Governance in Covid-19 Hit Malaysia","authors":"H. Por","doi":"10.1080/18752160.2022.2069952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/18752160.2022.2069952","url":null,"abstract":"From the temple murals in Bagan to the church fresco in Europe, visualization has been a vehicle of managing public health since time immemorial and it has a vital place in the governance of the current pandemic too. As importantly, governance is a field of actions, practices and activities, of which visualization constitutes a significant part, carried out by state and non-state actors, health professionals and lay persons, with the aim to directly or indirectly improve the management of pandemic. In other words, the governance of covid-19 is not monopolized by state actors and health professionals. Community and civil society too play as significant a part. Meanwhile, the general public are not merely targets of governance. As indicated in many parts of the world in the current pandemic, the general public are also actors who actively participate in governing and overseeing the conduct of their counterparts. Even though pandemic visualization is a general trend globally, each country has its idiosyncrasies. Two years into the pandemic, Malaysia has gone through several waves of covid-19, with the latest one associated with the highly transmissible Omicron variant, and three rounds of nationwide lockdown since 2020. This essay is an exploratory attempt to capture and contemplate pandemic visualizing in Malaysia, while covid-19 outbreak is still unfolding. As a tool of governance, covid-19 visualization comes in various forms, including projection model, mapping, body marking, photographic representation and visual narratives. One form often prevails over the other as the pandemic evolves and new situation arises. More importantly, images of pandemic contain more than evidentiary character. This essay views pandemic images not merely as objects that reflect truths and facts, but as intermediaries that are endowed with meanings, while being deployed to communicate certain social perspectives, construct certain ideas of medicine and science, and structure the way (s) audience see reality (Cooter & Stein 2010; Engelmann 2018; Ehring 1994; Hattori 2011; Imada 2017; Jordanova 1990).","PeriodicalId":45255,"journal":{"name":"East Asian Science Technology and Society-An International Journal","volume":"36 1","pages":"237 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77671031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2022.2069951
Chan‐Yuan Wong
The development literature in the 1990s highlighted the role of business elites and the government in an endowed embedded autonomy for economic wealth generation that is coevolved with societal welfare (Evans, 1995), in turn leading to desired socioeconomic development. The observations in Breznitz (2007) and Amsden et al. (2012) imply the significance of upgrading allies of elites in an economy, and how the derived institution leads to productive outcomes—as opposed to a predatory state, which enables capture by elites and portends a regressive governing outcome. Elites are professionally trained and selected—thus, it is desirable to have them guard the established institution, as it is perceived that they do this selflessly unlike the “masses”. The national solidarity of ruling elites in governing affairs (e.g. socioeconomic, health, security, commerce, etc.) is not uncommon in many countries. In recent years, there has been a wave of realization countering the view on the supremacy of elites and the need to form an army of superordinates to develop an economy (e.g. Major and Machin 2018; Markovits 2019). The pursuit of upgrading by elites may lead to industrial growth—but what also follows are income inequality and discontent between classes (in a country) and between economies. Many (Barr 2016; Pleyers 2020; Tan 2012) began to realize that decisions made by the elites/technocrats which are supposed to bewell thought out and rationally calculated could—on some occasions—lead tomediocre (unimpressive) results or even disastrous outcomes. Taiwan—once recognized as a Tiger economy (Mathews and Cho 2000: 157– 202)—had its success attributed by many to the superordinate workforce that
20世纪90年代的发展文献强调了商业精英和政府在与社会福利共同进化的经济财富创造中被赋予的嵌入式自治中的作用(Evans, 1995)，进而导致理想的社会经济发展。Breznitz(2007)和Amsden等人(2012)的观察暗示了提升经济中精英盟友的重要性，以及衍生制度如何导致生产性结果，而不是掠夺性国家，后者使精英能够捕获并预示着一种倒退的治理结果。精英是经过专业训练和选拔的——因此，让他们保卫既定制度是可取的，因为他们被认为是无私的，不像“大众”。统治精英在管理事务(如社会经济、卫生、安全、商业等)方面的全国团结在许多国家并不罕见。近年来，出现了一波反对精英至上和需要组建一支上级军队来发展经济的观点的认识浪潮(例如，Major and Machin 2018;马可维兹2019)。精英阶层对升级的追求可能会导致工业增长，但随之而来的是收入不平等和(在一个国家)阶级之间以及经济之间的不满。许多(Barr 2016;Pleyers 2020;谭(2012)开始意识到，由精英/技术官僚做出的决策，应该是经过深思熟虑和理性计算的，在某些情况下，可能会导致平庸(不起眼)的结果，甚至是灾难性的结果。台湾——曾经被认为是经济之虎(Mathews and Cho 2000: 157 - 202)——它的成功被许多人归因于优秀的劳动力
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2022.2076011
Xiaowei Huang
A note on this review: starting with the invitation for a conventional book review, Xiaowei Huang, the author who panned this essay, with the consideration of our readership, kindly offered his additional local observations in the scope of his discussion. As a result, an editorial decision was made to allow this essay to be published as such despite its length exceeding that of standard EASTS book reviews. We uphold this piece to be of merit and significance, and hope our readers can feel the same pleasure we did while reading it. —EASTS Editorial Office
{"title":"Sheila Jasanoff, The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future","authors":"Xiaowei Huang","doi":"10.1080/18752160.2022.2076011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/18752160.2022.2076011","url":null,"abstract":"A note on this review: starting with the invitation for a conventional book review, Xiaowei Huang, the author who panned this essay, with the consideration of our readership, kindly offered his additional local observations in the scope of his discussion. As a result, an editorial decision was made to allow this essay to be published as such despite its length exceeding that of standard EASTS book reviews. We uphold this piece to be of merit and significance, and hope our readers can feel the same pleasure we did while reading it. —EASTS Editorial Office","PeriodicalId":45255,"journal":{"name":"East Asian Science Technology and Society-An International Journal","volume":"36 1","pages":"245 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77185402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2021.1992577
Po-Hsun Chen
From the second half of the twentieth century onward, the more that modern biomedicine has developed, the more skepticism there has been toward synthetic drugs in Euro-American societies. Chinese herbs, on the other hand, are considered natural, safe, toxin-free remedies. However, in Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China, Yan Liu insightfully reminds us that Chinese herbs are not as safe as we imagine. He utilizes medical documents from medieval China to illustrate that poisonous drugs, or “potent drugs” as he calls them, possess “the power not just to harm as a poison but also to cure as a medicine in Chinese medicine” (6). With this fluid characteristic of potent drugs in mind, we need to rethink the concept of “poison” and reevaluate the role that poison played culturally and politically in medieval China (and even in modern society). The Sui–Tang period (581–907), as Yan Liu argues in his remarkable book, was critical for the transition of traditional pharmaceutical knowledge from formation to integration. Yan Liu obtained his PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University and is an expert in the history of medicine in medieval China. He probes the culture and politics of the Sui–Tang period through poisonous drugs. In the history of Chinese medicine, this period was characterized by the successful accumulation of medical knowledge formed in the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and provided a basis for integrating doctrinal learning and empirical knowledge in the Song Dynasty (960–1279). The most important medical policy of the Tang Dynasty was the publication of a national pharmacopoeia and the implementation of formal poisons regulation. This policy symbolized the empire intervening and standardizing medical knowledge and practices. In other words, Yan Liu contextualizes the development of poison and medical knowledge in the centralization of the empire and the discussion of “the Tang–Song transition.” The fluid characteristics of poisonous drugs is a critical lens through which to reconceptualize them in traditional medicine. Yan Liu disagrees with the absolutely
{"title":"Yan Liu, Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China","authors":"Po-Hsun Chen","doi":"10.1080/18752160.2021.1992577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/18752160.2021.1992577","url":null,"abstract":"From the second half of the twentieth century onward, the more that modern biomedicine has developed, the more skepticism there has been toward synthetic drugs in Euro-American societies. Chinese herbs, on the other hand, are considered natural, safe, toxin-free remedies. However, in Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China, Yan Liu insightfully reminds us that Chinese herbs are not as safe as we imagine. He utilizes medical documents from medieval China to illustrate that poisonous drugs, or “potent drugs” as he calls them, possess “the power not just to harm as a poison but also to cure as a medicine in Chinese medicine” (6). With this fluid characteristic of potent drugs in mind, we need to rethink the concept of “poison” and reevaluate the role that poison played culturally and politically in medieval China (and even in modern society). The Sui–Tang period (581–907), as Yan Liu argues in his remarkable book, was critical for the transition of traditional pharmaceutical knowledge from formation to integration. Yan Liu obtained his PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University and is an expert in the history of medicine in medieval China. He probes the culture and politics of the Sui–Tang period through poisonous drugs. In the history of Chinese medicine, this period was characterized by the successful accumulation of medical knowledge formed in the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and provided a basis for integrating doctrinal learning and empirical knowledge in the Song Dynasty (960–1279). The most important medical policy of the Tang Dynasty was the publication of a national pharmacopoeia and the implementation of formal poisons regulation. This policy symbolized the empire intervening and standardizing medical knowledge and practices. In other words, Yan Liu contextualizes the development of poison and medical knowledge in the centralization of the empire and the discussion of “the Tang–Song transition.” The fluid characteristics of poisonous drugs is a critical lens through which to reconceptualize them in traditional medicine. Yan Liu disagrees with the absolutely","PeriodicalId":45255,"journal":{"name":"East Asian Science Technology and Society-An International Journal","volume":"44 1","pages":"259 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90800294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2022.2069950
Hui-Hsi Chuang
The cover image is taken from the exhibition “ Gaia.: Gene, algorithm, intelligent design, automata A mirage self, The Other Realm ” , at MoCA Taipei. This exhibition explores how modern science and technology, being the new canon of Myth in our time, have gradually replaced the interpretation of classic Myth in the fi eld of life and nature. Artists illustrate various ways in which science and technology have transformed our understanding and imagination of life, constructing “ the other realm. ” This artwork, “ Transplant, ” created by artist Juan Zamora, shows a plant that has been transformed (a trans-plant). It re-presents a real-world, novel cardiovascular medical technology by which scientists cultured beating human heart cells on spinach leaves that were stripped of plant cells. As stated in the introduction, this work “ offers an imaginative space for the highly agriculturalized model of producing tissues or planting ‘ organs. ’”
{"title":"About the Cover","authors":"Hui-Hsi Chuang","doi":"10.1080/18752160.2022.2069950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/18752160.2022.2069950","url":null,"abstract":"The cover image is taken from the exhibition “ Gaia.: Gene, algorithm, intelligent design, automata A mirage self, The Other Realm ” , at MoCA Taipei. This exhibition explores how modern science and technology, being the new canon of Myth in our time, have gradually replaced the interpretation of classic Myth in the fi eld of life and nature. Artists illustrate various ways in which science and technology have transformed our understanding and imagination of life, constructing “ the other realm. ” This artwork, “ Transplant, ” created by artist Juan Zamora, shows a plant that has been transformed (a trans-plant). It re-presents a real-world, novel cardiovascular medical technology by which scientists cultured beating human heart cells on spinach leaves that were stripped of plant cells. As stated in the introduction, this work “ offers an imaginative space for the highly agriculturalized model of producing tissues or planting ‘ organs. ’”","PeriodicalId":45255,"journal":{"name":"East Asian Science Technology and Society-An International Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"263 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78012003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2021.1996937
J. Ying
This book is written by Professor Qi Han of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor Qi Han is renowned for his research in the history of Chinese printing and astronomy, as well as in the interaction between Chinese and European sciences, especigally during the Ming and Qing periods. This particular work gives the reader a general overview, based on his three decades of research, into the complexities of the transmission and interaction between Chinese and European calendrical astronomy from the late-sixteenth to the early-nineteenth century. The bulk of the work consists of a Prologue and nine chapters on different topics, which are arranged in an essentially chronological order. The Prologue describes the background: how European science began to spread in Ming and Qing China. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who was in Ming China in the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenth century, realized that the Ming court had a strong need for calendrical reform. Later, a wave of Jesuit missionaries who were well-versed in astronomy and mathematics reached China and were recruited into the Ming court. The Chinese court needed a better calendar to form part of the foundation for the ruling of the empire, while the Jesuits wanted to spread tianxue 天學, “heaven learning,” a consistent study of natural sciences and the Catholic religion. Calendrical reform, along with cultural and political struggles among different groups of interests, continued in various forms from the late-Ming period to the mid-Qing period in the eighteenth century. The stage is set, and the story starts. The first chapter gives a quick review of the transmission of European astrology in Ming and early-Qing China. Though related to calendrical astronomy, the astrological works written or translated by Jesuit missionaries found little favor among
{"title":"Qi Han 韩琦, Tongtian zhi xue: Yesu huishi he tianwenxue zai zhongguo de chuanbo 通天之学:耶稣会士和天文学在中国的传播 [The Study of Communicating with Heaven: Jesuits and the Dissemination of Astronomy in China]","authors":"J. Ying","doi":"10.1080/18752160.2021.1996937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/18752160.2021.1996937","url":null,"abstract":"This book is written by Professor Qi Han of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor Qi Han is renowned for his research in the history of Chinese printing and astronomy, as well as in the interaction between Chinese and European sciences, especigally during the Ming and Qing periods. This particular work gives the reader a general overview, based on his three decades of research, into the complexities of the transmission and interaction between Chinese and European calendrical astronomy from the late-sixteenth to the early-nineteenth century. The bulk of the work consists of a Prologue and nine chapters on different topics, which are arranged in an essentially chronological order. The Prologue describes the background: how European science began to spread in Ming and Qing China. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who was in Ming China in the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenth century, realized that the Ming court had a strong need for calendrical reform. Later, a wave of Jesuit missionaries who were well-versed in astronomy and mathematics reached China and were recruited into the Ming court. The Chinese court needed a better calendar to form part of the foundation for the ruling of the empire, while the Jesuits wanted to spread tianxue 天學, “heaven learning,” a consistent study of natural sciences and the Catholic religion. Calendrical reform, along with cultural and political struggles among different groups of interests, continued in various forms from the late-Ming period to the mid-Qing period in the eighteenth century. The stage is set, and the story starts. The first chapter gives a quick review of the transmission of European astrology in Ming and early-Qing China. Though related to calendrical astronomy, the astrological works written or translated by Jesuit missionaries found little favor among","PeriodicalId":45255,"journal":{"name":"East Asian Science Technology and Society-An International Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"256 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78520963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-31DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2021.1872147
Woochang Lee, Hyomin Kim
Abstract In 2008, the South Korean government decided to resume importing beef from the United States, which had been stopped since 2003. The government’s attempt to reassure citizens with scientific claims met severe resistance, resulting in a whirlwind of political and technoscientific controversies over risks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This article examines memories of protests in 2008 with two objectives; first, to discuss how sub-politics evolves when matters of concern become matters of fact and second, to better understand the aftermath of Korean BSE controversies. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews with proponents and opponents of the BSE protests were conducted in 2019 and analyzed. Focusing on the complicated discursive struggles over science, society, and their relations, we demonstrated that, along with what people widely accept as the “facts” about US beef, a modern imaginary of science and politics as two separate spheres was reconstructed in Korea.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-24DOI: 10.1080/18752160.2021.1984009
Nicolas Schillinger
Abstract In the first half of the twentieth century, the possibility of weaponizing bacteria and waging a biological war became a frequently discussed topic in Europe, America, and Asia. This article traces the discourse on bacteriological warfare (xijunzhan) before, during, and in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War and puts it in the historical context of the development of biomedical sciences, epidemic prevention, and governance in Republican China. The discussion of biowarfare might be understood as an expression of both the skepticism about the scientization as well as technologization of warfare and the fear of epidemics ravaging China at the time. Considering the prevalence of epidemics in China during the first half of the twentieth century, the horror scenario of biological warfare did not necessarily lead to the direct expansion of or change in actual anti-epidemic measures during the Republican era. However, the very possibility of bacteriological attacks increased the sensitivity and knowledge of decision makers, military personnel, and large parts of the population regarding the threat of infectious disease and epidemics. The dread of enemies dropping vessels filled with disease vectors helped to justify the promulgation and implementation of hygiene protocols, vaccine campaigns, and microbiological knowledge.
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