East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)
Not a member yet
608 research outputs found
Sort by
Reading the Corpse in Forensic Casebooks of Nineteenth Century China
Full text linkThis article examines two forensic casebooks from nineteenth century China. Forensic cases are among the favored sources for progressive narratives sketching out the development of forensic knowledge as a process through which anomalies are detected and explained, and new facts are ultimately incorporated into the existing corpus of knowledge. This article is aimed at providing an alternative view. It first argues that cases revealing a serious discrepancy vis-à-vis the official manual for autopsies are extremely few. It later demonstrates that, instead of accumulating facts challenging the authoritative manual, forensic case compilers primarily addressed the question of weighing evidence. They singled out cases which shed light on how to make a decision in the face of several competing, but already-known symptoms. Each case displays how the weighing process worked out depending on its particular and unrepeatable circumstantial configuration, with no intent to convey generalizable information. Collecting precedents is thus not intended to form new claims as opposed to the canonical manual, but to make it more applicable to a complex reality. Forensic case compilers, therefore, did not evaluate the official manual in terms of correctness or inaccuracy, exhaustiveness or deficiency. What really mattered was flexibility in using the book depending on the actual circumstances
A Scholarly Imprint: How Tibetan Astronomers Brought Jesuit Astronomy to Tibet
Full text linkThe European Jesuits’ mission to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is considered a world-historical event that played an important role in the transmission of knowledge between the West and the East. In spite of its historical significance, it was long assumed that the Jesuit mission to China and its scientific scholarship had never reached the mountainous regions of Tibet. As I have described elsewhere, this was not the case. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tibetans not only translated a large number of the Jesuits’ works into Tibetan, they also reformed the Tibetan calendar in accordance with the Jesuit-influenced calendar of the Qing. How did it happen and in which way? It was a twofold process achieved partially with Qing imperial sponsorship and partially on the Tibetans’ own initiative, sometimes even in a low-key, indirect and secretive way. In this article, I shall look at how a Tibetan Buddhist astronomer at the imperial court in Beijing wrote a manual for predicting solar and lunar eclipses. I will also look at how some Tibetan astronomers brought this imperial knowledge, apparently without explicit imperial approval, to the monasteries in Amdo, the North-East of Tibet, which mostly lies today in the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu, as well as how Tibetan astronomers in this region reformed their calendars according to the Jesuits’ astronomical system. Finally, I will describe how this tradition, in spite of recent political upheaval and tragedies, is still alive and practiced in Tibet
