Agriculture and the Making of Sciences (1100–1700)

This year’s lecture series is a collaboration between the European Research Centre for Chinese Studies, the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Hitherto historians of science tend to examine pre-modern agriculture in extra-European traditions from the perspective of modern agronomy retrospectively, often within a single ethno-linguistic context. In this set of seminars, speakers aim at reversing this approach by exploring how agricultural practices informed the emergent discrete scholarly categories and epistemic genres in disparate cultural and literary traditions. Presenters focus on particular traditions of knowledge in their own terms, both in their cultural context and as emerging languages of authority, while being mindful of the cross-cultural and longue durée interplay between different fields and traditions of knowledge. They examine how everyday agricultural practices and material actions shaped these categories in particular, and knowledge cultures in general, to address some key questions.

1. How were diverse forms of knowledge that did not conveniently fit into the discrete scholarly categories and epistemic agendas of their respective times negotiated, (re-)articulated and denounced?
2. What are the practices and strategies of claiming authority?
3. What are the resources, networks, and institutions behind the emergence of new categories?

农业与近代诸科学的起源（1100—1700年）

本系列讲座由欧洲汉学研究中心、中国科学院自然科学史研究所与马克斯·普朗克科学史研究所合作举办。

迄今，科学史学者在检视欧洲以外的前近代农业时，往往从现代“农学”的既定框架中回顾，其视野也仅限于单一语言文化的史料。本系列研讨会邀请的发言人致力于倒转这种视角，探索在不同文化和文字传统中，农业实践如何影响、导致了近代以前诸多“学问”的诞生。发言者们专注于将特定知识传统置于其本身的文化和知识语境中，考察其如何构成一种权威的话语，同时也留心各种不同的知识领域与传统之间跨文化和长时段的互相影响。通过考察日常农业实践如何形塑各种学问及其背后的知识文化，本研讨会关心以下核心问题：

1. 在其各自时代无法轻易归入各种知识门类的知识形式是如何被协商、重新阐释或舍弃的？
2. 知识的权威性是如何构建的？
3. 新的学问门类的出现，其背后是怎样的制度、资源和关系网络？