The Paper's reporter Zhong Yuan zhu tingting
【Editor's Note】The "Global Vision and Material Culture History Series" published by The China Workers Publishing House includes four books: "Luxury and Pleasure: The Material World of 18th-Century Britain", "Tea in China: A History of Religion and Culture", "Designing Exotic Styles: Geography, Globalization and the World of Early Modern Europe", and "Plants and Empires: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World". Jiang Zhushan, editor-in-chief of the series of books and director of the Institute of History of the "Central" University in Taiwan, believes that in recent years, the momentum of global history translation has been very strong, but it lacks a material and cultural aspect, and this set of books is a combination of global history and material culture. In addition, Jiang Zhushan's book "Watching Movies and Learning History" was recently published by the Shanghai People's Publishing House, which also pays attention to global history from the perspective of film. The Paper,Private History conducted an exclusive interview with Jiang Zhushan, talking about material culture works from a global perspective and the global history of medical care. The following is the text of the interview.
Jiang Zhushan
The Paper: What is the origin of your editor-in-chief of this "Global Vision and Material Culture History Series"?
Jiang Zhushan: Recently, the study of global history is a new trend in the current historical research, and the global history book department has translated many classics, but it lacks the material culture aspect. Even if there is, it is a global history of a single species, such as the Global History of Food series.
This book is based on the perspectives of global history and material culture. There are not many translations in this regard, and many classics have not been selected. In fact, there are many new books and classics from the perspective of material culture history, such as the following masterpieces on material culture history from the perspective of global history, which still need to be strengthened and promoted.
The Paper: Can you elaborate on some of the works on material and cultural history from the perspective of global history? What are the characteristics of material culture history research from the perspective of global history?
Jiang Zhushan: Recently, more and more works have combined the perspective of global history with the orientation of material and cultural history. For example, the newly published Japanese book "History のなか Consumer: Japan における Consumption と暮らし, 1850-2000" (Consumption and Daily Life in Japan, 1850-2000). The book was first published in English in 2012, and the participating Japanese and British scholars, with funding from the British Association for Japanese Studies and the Yamato Japan-Uk Foundation, began to study the history of modern and contemporary Consumption in Japan from a comparative perspective and the context of world history. The introduction to the book is brilliantly written, citing research in Chinese history, especially the works of Timothy Brook, Craig Clunas, and S.A.M. Adshead. This is no longer a topic that can be handled by economic and social history alone, but contains many new perspectives on cultural history and global history. The topics covered here are quite interesting, and the topics covered are: domestic labor, household goods and women, consumer life, sugar consumption, fiber industry, Hehan pharmaceutical industry, railway passengers, postal affairs and consumption, communications and trafficking, and consumerism.
In the process of interpreting consumer culture, the history of material culture provides us with an important basis. Ito るり, Sakamoto ひろ子 and other scholars co-edited "モダンガルと Colonial Modern Times" ("Modern Women and colonial modern times"), although published for a period of time, many articles are still deeply inspiring. The content is not only about gender, but also about material culture, consumer society, the senses, visual culture, advertising, politics, colonies and empires. The book's study of modern women and fashion in colonial Taiwan points out that in the late 1920s, new women who received a new education began to wear Western clothes because they were in the upper class and were influenced by Western-style education, forming a trend of modern women (モダンガル). Among these articles, my favorite is Adachi Mariko's Shiseido and spice lithophylloid research, which not only focuses on corporate history, but also combines commodities with modernity smells and senses of smell.
The study of Western consumer culture arose around the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the most representative book is The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England by Neil Mckendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. They studied the consumption culture of the British middle class in the eighteenth century, and put forward the "consumption revolution theory", pointing out the changes in British consumer culture at that time, including household income and demand, the expansion of the market, the increase of the urban population, the popularization of luxury goods, the great prosperity of popular fashion, the role of social imitation, the change of luxury concepts, etc. They called this phenomenon the birth of the British "consumer society". In addition to this classic work, two other collections of papers also represent the research results of Western consumer culture in the 1990s, namely Concept and the World of Gods and The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800. Recently, the study of The history of the Ming and Qing dynasties has also been influenced by this trend, and more and more scholars have invested in the study of ming and qing consumer culture, such as food, clothing, houses, furniture, palanquins, imported goods, etc., which have become the objects of historians' research.
These studies were heavily influenced by European and American sociology and anthropological studies of "things". For example, Kruger's research on the commodification of artifacts in late Ming societies was inspired by Arjun Appadurai (anthropologists' recent "sense of things and bodies", such as Yu Shunde's research on the nuances of body objects: a study of matter and body sensation). Kruger pointed out that the process of commercialization of cultural relics and works of art in the late Ming Dynasty, through its price fluctuations, market emergence and rapid turnover, researchers found that the cultural relics that were not originally commodities in the late Ming Dynasty have been commercialized. Another example is the study furniture of the literati, after the commercialization of furniture in the late Ming Dynasty, the space of the study can be purchased with money to purchase decorations, and the study is no longer the patent of the scholar, which also makes the scholar, especially the lower class scholars and literati, face a crisis in identity status. In addition, the French cultural historian Daniel Roche's "The History of Ordinary Things: Consumption from the Birth of Traditional Societies (17th-19th Centuries)" is also worthy of our reference.
Global Perspectives and the History of Material Culture Series
The Paper: The COVID-19 pandemic that raged in 2020 has made everyone very concerned about the global history of medical care. In this series, "Plants and Empires: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World" seems to have cut from the perspective of medicine and plants.
Jiang Zhushan: A study on the global history of medicine focuses on the relationship between plants, medicines, and commerce. This approach not only has a global perspective, but also has the characteristics of cultural shifts.
Speaking of this study of naturalism and the history of material culture, one has to mention the contributions of Londa Schiebinger and Harold J. Cook: Ronda Spenger's Plants and Medicine, and the British historian of medicine Harold Cook's Masters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, the two scholars, have invariably focused on the interplay between the circulation of things, business and medical knowledge.
Recently, Harold Cook continued the direction of his previous book by curating a special title with Timothy D. Walker in the August 2013 issue of the Social History of Medicine, "Mobilising Medicine: Trade & Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic World." In his article "Circulation of Medicine in the Early Modern Atlantic World," Cook mentions that in the past decade, the contextual study of medical history has begun to attract the attention of historians. These stem from an increased interest in material and transnational cultures that constructed works of early world history.
Harold Cook also mentioned that a new direction in the history of medical care has recently been opened up on the basis of many academic works on the globalization of commodity activities and goods. Many English writings focus on the circulation of medical knowledge. Patrick Wallis raised the importance of trade in medical goods to the UK. Karol Kovalovih Weaver's Medical Revolutionaries points out that Africa's contribution to the fusion of medical knowledge in the Atlantic world is gradually being recognized.
The "Mobilising Medicine" section offers us a new perspective on the history of medicine. The authors are all scholars specializing in the regionalities of Europe and the Atlantic world, but this time their focus is on the interconnection of medicine in the Atlantic world, but it does not mean that there is a clear boundary, because the Atlantic world is only one of the focal points, sometimes spanning a global scope. However, this focus also gives us an idea of whether interregional popular interaction is free, coercive, or mutually consultative. The aim was to bring these together to show that the medical treatments associated with the populace around the Surrounding Atlantic were mixed, influenced not only by the history of where Europeans went, but also by the history of Europe itself.
They believed that medical care was not only a concept and practice, but also part of the architecture of the business and colonial causes of the time. In the case of Harold Cook, the search for useful drugs in the West has driven countless people and things around the globe for centuries. This search for useful goods plays an important role in the new global business. In the process of searching for spices and medicine, Europeans had further contact with people on the atlantic edge. As they exchanged medicines, some of the surgical and novelty innovations of the new world also appeared at the same time. This connection of exchange lines gave rise to Atlantic commerce, allowing European ships to carry not only people and goods, but also knowledge everywhere.
Similar material culture studies can also refer to Gu Yawen's parasite control of cinchona tree and Zhang Suyue's seaweed and Japanese rule in Taiwan. Gu Yawen's "Cultivation of Cinchona Trees and Quinine Pharmaceuticals in Taiwan during the Japanese Occupation" studies the cultivation of cinchona trees from an imperial perspective, explores its development in different periods, and examines the relationship between cinchona trees, quinines and Taiwan malaria prevention during the Japanese rule period. Zhang Suyue's article "The Worm Crisis: Parasitic Control in SeamanGrass and Taiwan (1921-1945)" discusses the situation of parasitic diseases in Taiwan and the expulsion of roundworms in Japan, as well as the relationship between seaweed and the treatment of ascariasis. The article seems to approach the disease and the environment, but a slightly more attentive reader should be able to see the relationship between drug development and business here.
In the past, there were few monographs on the study of drugs and commerce in the Japanese period, and now only the popular works of Pi Guoguo's "Chinese Medicine Meets Western Medicine" can be found. Liu Shiyong's "Medicine, Business and Social Imagination: Chinese Medicine in Japanese Governance of Taiwan" is one of the few masterpieces in this regard. He was influenced by the research of American historians Sherman Cochran, Harold Cook, and Lei Xianglin, and particularly adjusted the research perspective of consumer culture. Liu Shiyong cites the example of Gao Jialong's "Chinese Pharmaceutical Merchants" to illustrate that it is precisely because local pharmaceutical companies can often impress consumers' desire to buy with "localized" advertising techniques, thus creating a stable consumer network, making pharmaceutical companies and Western companies and consumers three-legged. The two aspects of the book are whether Western-based multinational pharmaceutical companies can homogenize global consumption regardless of local differences, and whether only multinational countries outside the West can promote Western consumer culture to these.
In addition to commercial and medical concerns, some scholars have made special use of newspaper advertisements for research. Zhang Zhongmin's research emphasizes material culture and commercial culture, and he investigates the most important brain tonic in modern China, "Ailuo Brain Juice", and tries to analyze the role and significance of commerce and consumption with advertising as the medium in the process of body construction in modern China. He not only focuses on the discourse in advertising, but also adopts the analytical techniques of cultural research to analyze the narrative structure and rhetorical characteristics of advertising. The biggest difference from previous advertising researchers is that he has made many studies on the background of advertising authors, and found a large number of readers and consumers who respond to Airo's brain supplement and its advertisements.
In addition to focusing on the above topics in the context of medical history, some scholars have watched shiseido develop from a pharmaceutical shop into a transnational cosmeceutical business from the perspective of urban history and consumer culture of "cultural installations". Hirofumi Wada's Shiseido Cultural Installation (1872-1945) is a masterpiece of this subject, and medical care is only a part of the book rather than a focus, but it is enough to inspire us to study the culture of medicine consumption and global history.
On the whole, more and more fields of historical research have been placed in the context of a global perspective and material culture, such as medical treatment, environment, cultural exchange, empire, publishing culture, consumption, historical memory and food, which are worth learning from.
The Paper: How do you think the global perspective makes differences in historical research? Can researchers study national and ethnic histories from a global perspective?
Jiang Zhushan: There are already many works in the works of national history and national history from the perspective of global history.
Global history is characterized by the following points: 1. Global historians not only take a macroscopic perspective, but also try to put specific historical issues into a broader global context; 2. Global history will experiment with different spatial concepts, rather than taking political or cultural units as a starting point; 3. Global history emphasizes relevance, advocating that a historical unit such as civilization, nation, and family does not develop in isolation and must be understood through the interaction of the unit with other units; 4. Global history emphasizes the "spatial turn", often in terms of territoriality and geopolitics Spatial metaphors such as circulation and network replace the old temporal terms such as "development", "time difference" and "backwardness"; 5. Pay attention to the synchronization of historical events and advocate placing more importance on events that occur at the same point in time; 6. Reflect on the shortcomings of Eurocentrism in a different way than previous world history writings.
However, Conrad also pointed out the limitations of global history. He argues that in addition to questions of scale, global historians face four problems: the concept of "global" that could lead historians to erase the logic peculiar to the past; to worship connections excessively; to ignore issues of power; and to disregard historical facts in pursuit of a unified framework.
In addition, global history does not mean that we should take the world as the research unit, but that we should think about how to bring it into the global perspective of existing research topics. In terms of research methods, the following models can be adopted, such as: 1. describe the various types of "communication networks" that have existed in human history; 2. Discuss how inventions and creations originating in a certain region have caused reactions in the world; 3. Explore the interplay of cultural influences after different groups of people meet; 4. Explore the relationship between "small places" and "big worlds"; 5. Globalization of local history; 6. Thematic comparison on a global scale. In terms of research topics, researchers can explore topics such as empire, international relations, transnational organization, circulation of things, company, human rights, discrete communities, individuals, technology, war, maritime history, gender and race through a global perspective. From this point of view, the study of acetarin is quite in line with the above characteristics.
The Paper: You used to focus more on new cultural history, and now you focus on global history, what kind of combination can the two be combined?
Jiang Zhushan: Although the new cultural history has a downward trend, it has not disappeared, and some issues have shifted to the perspective of global history. For example, the problem of cross-cultural communication, the problem of boundary, the problem of material exchange, the problem of information transmission, and the role of intermediaries in the age of great navigation are all good examples of combining cultural history with global history.
The Paper: You are also an active promoter of public historiography, in your opinion, how should you expand the view of history for ordinary readers? What changes should professional historians make to popular history writing?
Jiang Zhushan: There are many academic research monographs, how to jump out of the framework of academic papers, so that rigorous historical training is more in line with the narrative power of public reading, this part of the Chinese scholars write relatively little, European and American historiography has many scholars in colleges themselves are also popular historians, such as Bu Zhengmin is.
The focus is still on the premise of who the reader is when writing, and if it is only written for experts, it will be limited. In this era of readers, there have been many translations of famous works of public historiography recently, and there are many aspects that can be selected for reading, and new media also play many functions in this regard.
Jiang Zhushan, "Watching Movies and Learning History", Shanghai People's Publishing House, March 2021
The Paper: In your new book, "Watching Movies and Learning History," you also talk about the relationship between movies and globalization and global history. Can you give an example of how to watch a film from the perspective of global history?
Jiang Zhushan: Because I am interested in the perspective of global history, I will pay special attention to some films or documentaries that discuss globalization and global history issues. For example, in "For the Thief of Heaven", Young Germans criticize the world's major factories for their oem work in the Third World, squeezing child labor, inequality between rich and poor, and even the problem of capitalization after the great changes in socialist countries, such films as well as "Goodbye Lenin" and "The World is Flat".
Recently, I watched the documentary "Ocean Conspiracy", saying that the destruction and pollution of the marine environment is not only too much plastic waste in the past, nor is it warming, in fact, the truth is the harm caused by our commercial fishing methods, so the focus is to eat less fish to solve the problem, which involves using the perspective of global history.
The recent new book "The Great History of Fishing" can look at fishery culture from the context of historical development, and it is also very suitable for collocation. In addition, the problem of new crown pneumonia in the past two years has also led to our concern for the interaction between the plague and human civilization, and this part can also be referred to in many movies, such as the Ebola virus talked about in "Crisis Story", or the latest Netflix film "DeerHorn Boy", which also talks about the impact of the virus outbreak on human beings. These are well suited to bringing into the discussion of global history.
Editor-in-Charge: Han Shaohua
Proofreader: Yan Zhang