About the seminar
This is an optional 1 ETCS course. To get the ETCS students must read the course materials beforehand and hand in a short paper afterwards (maximum 5 pages).
This seminar will bring in analytical concepts from various fields outside of Chinese history on three topics related to the mind-body relationship:
- Bodily arts of memory in early-modern European history.
- The body-as-technology from work on Ayurvedic medical history.
- The extended mind hypothesis that emerged within cognitive science in the late 1990s.
Here, the distinction in cultural anthropology between emic and etic viewpoints is instructive: the emic view is the insiders’ perspectives, how subjects perceive things, and so whatever distinctions are meaningful within their society; the etic view is the outsiders’ perspectives, how observers analyze things in another culture, and so whatever analytical concepts they find meaningful to interpret any given society.
Through specific scholars’ work I have found useful to think through the phenomenon of “knowing hands” in Chinese history, we will discuss how finding the right analytical concepts (the etic) in secondary sources can be a powerful way to do justice to the complexity of historical actor’s categories and practices (the emic) in primary sources.
Scholarship on bodily arts of memory in early modern Europe, for example, has informed how I interpret comparable examples in medieval to early modern China. The concept of body-as-technology, on the other hand, shifted my attention from the patient’s body to that of the healers themselves.
It brings new concerns to the fore related to how and when the healer’s body is used as a healing or predictive instrument and when the practitioner’s body is not, or no longer, considered essential for efficacious or accurate results.
This new focus on healers’ bodies not only promises greater symmetry to the doctor-patient encounter but also deeper understanding of similarities between medicine and divination in practice.
Finally, work in cognitive science on the extended-mind hypothesis and embodied cognition provide useful perspectives on how people instrumentalize their hands as extensions of their minds past and present.
The seminar seeks to inspire all participants to consider how they navigate emic-etic distinctions in their own research and writing and so specify what conceptual methods and analytical concepts have been most productive for thinking through their primary sources.
Before the seminar, Marta will give a lecture on her current project "Knowing Hands". Participants are invited to join both arragements.
Bibliography for seminar
- Bodily Arts of Memory
- Weiss Susan Forscher. 2000. “The Singing Hand,” 35-45. In Claire Sherman (ed), Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. The Trout Gallery, distributed by the University of Washington Press.
- Cooperrider, Kensy. 2022. “Handy Mnemonics: The Five-fingered Memory Machine.” Accessed August 17, 2023.
- Body-as-Technology
- Mukharji, Projit. Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2016. Ch. 7 “Baidya-as-Technology: From Diagnosis to Pharmacy in a Bottle,” 274-305. [full chapter not available on line, PDF available].
- Extended-Mind hypothesis and Embodied Cognition
- Bender, Andrea, and Sieghard Beller. 2012. “Nature and culture of finger counting: Diversity and representational effects of an embodied cognitive tool”. Cognition 124: 156-182.
- Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. 1998. “The extended mind”. Analysis 58.1: 7-19.
Optional my related publications
- “Hand Mnemonics in Classical Chinese Medicine: Texts, Earliest Images, and Arts of Memory.” Asia Major 3rd series 21.1 (2008): 325-357.
- “Hand Mnemonics in Medieval Chinese Buddhism: Practicing Embodiment as Historical Method.” Translated and published into Korean. Ch. 4 in Myeongsang-gwa chiyu 명상과 치유 (Meditation and Healing), 105-132. Iksan, South Korea: The Institute of Mind Humanities, Wonkwang University, 2016.
- “‘The Mysterious Names on the Hands & Fingers’: Healing Hand Mnemonics in Medieval Chinese Buddhism,” 478-485. In C. Pierce Salguero (ed.), Buddhism and Healing in East Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
- “’From Under the Elbow to Pointing to the Palm’: Chinese Metaphors for Learning Medicine by the Book (4th-14th Centuries).” British Journal for the History of Science Themes 5 (2020): 75-92.
- “Grasping Heaven and Earth (Qian Kun Zai Wo乾坤在握): The Body-as-Technology in Classical Chinese Medicine.” Chinese Medicine and Culture 6.3 (2023): forthcoming. [PDF of proof pages available].
- “L’esprit en main dans le Canon classifié (Leijing 類經, 1624) [The Mind in Hand in the Classified Canon, 1624]. Special Issue on “Histoires de mains,” Revue Historique forthcoming. [PDF of final draft available].
About Marta Hanson
Marta Hanson, PhD, is an independent scholar who publishes widely about the history of medicine in China, public health in East Asia, and early modern Sino-European medical exchanges.
She was Assistant Professor of late imperial Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego (1997-2004) and then Associate Professor of East Asian medical history in the History of Medicine Department, Johns Hopkins University (2004-2021). She is currently a visiting scholar at Max-Plank-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin.
Her book is Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011). She is working on a book manuscript titled Grasping Heaven and Earth: The Mind in Hand in Classical Chinese Medicine.
This book examines connections between medicine and divination in Ming China and how physicians borrowed from diviners on how to use their hands to think with, divine, and heal.
Within cross-cultural medical history, she has an on-going scholarly collaboration with Gianna Pomata (early modern European historian) on 17th- to 18th-century translations of Chinese medical texts into European languages.
This has resulted in several publications related to the Specimen Medicinæ Sinicæ (A Sample of Chinese Medicine, 1682), the first translation into Latin of Chinese medical texts. Related to contemporary issues, she has written about Chinese medical responses to SARS, what COVID19 has revealed about US-China differences, and cultural patterns of responses to pandemics.
She was senior co-editor of the journal Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity (2011-2016), President of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (ISHEASTM, 2015-2019), and Secretary of the International Society for the Study of Asian Medicine (IASTAM 2006-2009).
Currently, she is Vice President of the International Society for the Critical Study of Divination (ISCSD 2023) and on the editorial boards of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, East Asian Science, Technology, and Society, Asian Medicine, Chinese Medicine and Culture, and the Asian Journal of Medical Humanities.