East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal , 2024
Red-crowned white cranes, large migratory birds symbolizing longevity, fidelity, and independence... more Red-crowned white cranes, large migratory birds symbolizing longevity, fidelity, and independence from power across East Asian cultures, came to live in scholar-official households in late Chosŏn. With the residency of this elegant bird in scholarly households around the mid-eighteenth century, a new knowledge practice that took serious interest in things like cranes emerged. This paper illuminates the roles of these highly cross-cultured things in late-Chosŏn knowledge transformation, echoing material turns in various disciplines. Necessitating knowledge to properly possess and accompany them, cranes led to a new scholarly attachment to things. It opened up an unprecedented intellectual attitude that valued curiosity, taste, and facts concerning things and emphasized usefulness of that newly obtained thing-knowledge. Curiosity, taste, facts, and the usefulness of knowledge obtained new meanings in other parts of the world that experienced similar transitions in knowledge practice by and towards things. While delineating the roles of cranes specifically in late-Chosŏn's transformation through the imprints that they left in scholarly acts and works, this paper proposes a new way to connect knowledge transformations in different parts of the globe, via these newly migrating things, moving away from the narrative that requires an origin and transfers.
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Papers by Jung Lee
encompassing Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, Urban Studies, Development Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Environmental Humanities, and Engineering. Infrastructure first appeared in the late 19th century with technoscientific systems like railroads and telegraphy, which promised to liberate the human from the constraints of time, space, and toil. It consists of huge engineering systems which enable the circulations of water, energy, resources, and information. Infrastructural studies have become a hot topic in the recent two decades discussing aging infrastructure, the effects of the climate crisis, and the global trend towards privatization. This paper looks into the challenges confronting our infrastructure with these studies, while also
examining three ways in which the historical understanding of infrastructure can possibly become more ecological. First is the expansion of the “material turn” in humanities by exploring infrastructure, which is not only material but social and cultural in nature. Second is the breaking down of some mis-construed binaries, such as modern/traditional and developed/developing, by illuminating the actual complex trajectories of infrastructure in global history that confuse the linear progression of history implied in those binaries. Third is the construction of an ecological history, using a more fluid concept of infrastructure, seeing them as socioecological backbone networks shaped in dynamic interactions between nature and society.
unhygienic life style and environment, is a most prevalent infectious
disease in colonial Korea (1910-1945), especially among Japanese
imperial settlers. Among them, the residents of Keijo, the impressively
modernized capital of the colony, suffered the most. It was an enigma
since the city was best equipped with sanitary infrastructures, which
way in turn clearly was favored by the famously clean Japanese
settlers. This paper examines this enigma of the Japanese imperial
hygiene within the political settings of colonial Korea. Especially, it
analyzes its relationship with privileges that Japanese imperial settlers
had pursued and enjoyed. Living in the Japanese side of the city with
properly Japanese style, they indeed enjoyed the up-to-date hygienic and
medical infrastructures and interventions like the running water and free
vaccines. Yet, the hygienic infrastructure and medical interventions in
colonial Korea, like all other modern systems, had their limitations and
uncertainties, partly owing to their own profit-seeking business model.
The Japanese settlers just made themselves more vulnerable to them in
two ways, with their well-discussed identity as “brokers of empire,” if
not quasi-rulers. Firstly, as part of the ruling power, they could not acknowledge those limitations of the imperial hygiene that they had
helped to create. Secondly, unable to equate themselves with the
colonized who were to be disciplined for their unhygienic habits and
life styles, they refused interventions that demanded to correct their
habits and life styles. Keeping their preferences of “cold tofu” or
“sashimi,” and too confident about their imperial regime, these Japanese
settlers of Keijo kept their association with that unhygienic disease.
This paper displays the vulnerability of Japanese colonial modernity
even for its most benefited group while revealing the unique power
structure of the Japanese colonial regime, which was built on and
sustained by these privileges of unofficial rulers who refused to be
disciplined as hygienic subjects.
the past four years. It deals with its modernist bias and “problem of China”
up front, while venturing out to find new sources of inspiration in adjacent
fields. The modernist bias that singles out what resembles modern science from the knowledge practice that had different intellectual questions and aims has been criticized. Also, the “problem of China,” the difficulty of finding what distinguished Korean from Chinese knowledge practice, bothered researchers since Korean science often just looked a poor and delayed derivative of Chinese one. In addressing these problems, the works in the past four years show rather a valiant attitude. They mostly turned to discuss the strange science of the premodern era “on their own terms,” while embracing the peripheral strategies of utilizing Chinese sources as a valid way of pursuing their own intellectual and social agenda. The monograph series “Science and Civilization in Korea” enriches these endeavors by combining archeological and anthropological understandings with their concerns about materials and
everyday lives. History of technology engaging with history of art and craft
shares those concerns too. Upon the acute awareness about how non-human actors like a virus could shape history, the history of Korean science which came to embrace its strange peripheral endeavors may make a new turn to this history of matters and everyday practice of science and technology.