CALL FOR PRESENTERS: Details here.
Thursday, June 11 at 6 p.m. (JST)
Short Circuits and Missed Connections: The Confucian Origins of Agricultural Science in Modern Japan
Scott Ma (University of Zurich & Waseda University)
Science is typically understood within the historiography of modern Japan as the introduction of Western ways of knowing that either replaced, fused, or overlaid traditional Japanese ways of knowing. This paper uses the example of the modernization of agricultural science in nineteenth-century Japan to argue to the contrary: firstly, that modern science was institutionalized and understood through native categories, and secondly, that these “native” categories through which modern agriculture was translated were self-consciously derived from the Sinitic literary and philosophical tradition. To make this case, it first considers how early-modern Japanese thinkers understood the meanings of agricultural knowledge as an economic, political, and colonial tool. It then provides a revision of our standard narrative of Hokkaido’s colonization—modern science, settler colonialism, American advisors—to show how the “science” was promoted for traditional purposes, the Americans were mired in their own disputes surrounding the proper means of agricultural education, and a traditional East Asian variant of settler colonialism remained the best explanation for colonial decision-making. The ideological confusion of the early Meiji, coupled with the felt imperative to learn rapidly from a “West” that was hardly united in its own right, enabled not a radical overhaul, but a revision and in large parts a preservation of traditional structures of knowledge. The paper will also discuss the Komaba Agricultural School and the definitive formalization of the imperial agricultural extension apparatus at the turn of the twentieth century.
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