The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan |
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Author:
| Marcon, Federico |
Series title: | Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Ser. |
ISBN: | 978-0-226-25190-5 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2015 |
Publisher: | University of Chicago Press
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | AUD $74.95 |
Book Description:
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From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or
honzogaku. Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by
honzogaku practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased...
More DescriptionFrom the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or honzogaku. Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by honzogaku practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of honzogaku slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.