Joseph Needham in Korea, and Korea’s Position in the History of East Asian Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-401
Author(s):  
Jongtae Lim 林宗台
Keyword(s):  
East Asian ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Chinese Science ◽  
Power Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Achievements

Abstract As they were in other East Asian countries, Joseph Needham and his monumental works were warmly received by Korean historians of science in the late twentieth century. Korean historians appreciated both Needham’s pioneering research on the history of Chinese science and his praise of Korea’s contribution to East Asian scientific tradition, as expressed, for example, in the addenda to volume 3 of Science and Civilisation in China. But the Koreans’ praise of Needham was not unqualified. Needham’s largely favorable remarks on Korean science invited criticism from several prominent Korean historians who noted many factual errors, particularly relating to Korea’s priority over China in several technological inventions. They regarded those errors as indicative of Needham’s deep-rooted historiographical bias, his view of Korea as a mere tributary of China’s scientific tradition. But the Koreans’ criticism of Needham ironically shows that they agreed with the central tenets of Needham’s methodology of crediting scientific achievements to different civilizations, whereby to measure China’s contribution to what Needham termed “universal modern science.” The Koreans only scaled down the scope of comparison from the world of civilizations to a smaller region called East Asia, whereby to compare Korea’s share with that of China. This article thus takes the Korean criticism of Needham as an illuminating case, which invites us to think over a less explored issue in the history of East Asian science: how to write a balanced history of science in a region that is characterized by a stark disparity in power, resources, and achievements between China and its smaller neighbors.

A Walk in the Woods

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
California Coast ◽  
Light Rain ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Guided Tour ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The forest was small by American standards, perhaps fifty or sixty acres, but in the rolling Devon countryside with its parceled fields and narrow, hedge-enclosed lanes, it felt appropriately spacious. I was enjoying the guided tour in one of my favorite parts of the world. The light rain and chilly July breezes felt right; the English ivy carpeting the ground seemed right; the leafy hardwoods looked right (although I didn’t know the species and could easily have been fooled); and the probably medieval bank and ditch running through the woods at right angles to the path gave everything an impressive air of authenticity. The path turned. As we rounded the corner, I saw ahead the darker shade of conifers. Soon we were in the midst of a grove of youthful but already towering California-coast redwoods. A deep silence hung like a benediction over the dark wood, but it was quickly shattered. “I’d give anything to be allowed to cut them down,” said our guide, Stephan, in an angry voice. This incident passed out of my thoughts until weeks later back in New Jersey, when I was reading the chapter on conservation in Oliver Rack-ham’s The History of the Countryside, an account of the origins of Britain’s landscapes, flora, and fauna. The British landscape of the late twentieth century, Rack-ham wrote, is suffering from an acute loss of meaning—the unique messages once conveyed by many historic woodlands, witness to millennia of slow and painstaking change, have been garbled beyond recognition in five or six decades of modern planting, “restoration,” development, and agriculture. The more I read in this remarkable book, surely one of the most profound and eloquent descriptions of people and nature ever written, the more I understood Stephan’s feeling that his Devon woodland had been desecrated by the planting of those redwoods. I also began to understand how little I knew about the long discourse between people and trees in Britain, where the history of the relationship is probably as well documented as in any place on earth.

The Recurrence of the Evolutionary Epic

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Hesketh
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Universe Story ◽  
The Big Bang ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Big History

In his 1978 On Human Nature, Edward Wilson defined the evolutionary epic as the scientific story of all life, a linear narrative beginning with the big bang and ending with the story of human history. Since that time several popular science writers have attempted to write that story of life producing such titles as The Universe Story (1992)and The Epic of Evolution (2006). Historians have also gotten into the act under the guise of “Big History,” which has resulted in a series of monographs and is taught at several universities and high schools throughout the world. While the evolutionary epic is often presented as a novel way of bringing the historical insights of modern science into a narrative form that transcends the humanities–natural science divide, the genre itself originates in the nineteenth century, just as new geological and cosmic timescales were being established and new sciences such as biology and anthropology were being formalized. Several German Naturphilosophen and Victorian naturalists imagined the history of life as one, as a “Cosmos,” and produced evolutionary epics that bare significant similarities with their more modern counterparts. By considering the various recurrences of the evolutionary epic, from its origins in early German Romanticism and Victorian naturalism to the degeneration narratives of the fin de siècle and on to the Wilsonian and Big History versions of the late twentieth century and beyond, this essay seeks to map out a shared intellectual genealogy while examining the genre’s conceptual commonalities. What is perhaps most compelling about the history of the genre is the striking persistence of non-Darwinian forms of evolution that are utilized to situate the emergence of humanity in these epic narratives of life.

URBAN DISPLACEMENT AND LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES: THE CASE OF THE AMERICAN CITY FROM THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 06 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Knight ◽  
Mohammad Gharipour
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Minority Populations ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

How can urban redevelopment benefit existing low-income communities? The history of urban redevelopment is one of disruption of poor communities. Renewal historically offered benefits to the place while pushing out the people. In some cases, displacement is intentional, in others it is unintentional. Often, it is the byproduct of the quest for profits. Regardless of motives, traditional communities, defined by cultural connections, are often disrupted. Disadvantaged neighborhoods include vacant units, which diminish the community and hold back investment. In the postwar period, American cities entered into a program of urban renewal. While this program cleared blight, it also drove displacement among the cities’ poorest and was particularly hard on minority populations clustered in downtown slums. The consequences of these decisions continue to play out today. Concentration of poverty is increasing and American cities are becoming more segregated. As neighborhoods improve, poorer residents are uprooted and forced into even more distressed conditions, elsewhere. This paper examines the history of events impacting urban communities. It further reviews the successes and failures of efforts to benefit low-income communities.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Freidenfelds
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Maternal Education ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unrealistic Expectation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy is a history of why Americans came to have the unrealistic expectation of perfect pregnancies and to mourn even very early miscarriages. The introduction explains that miscarriage is a common phenomenon and a natural part of healthy women’s childbearing: approximately 20 percent of confirmed pregnancies spontaneously miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Eight topical chapters describe childbearing and pregnancy loss in colonial America; the rise of birth control from the late eighteenth century to the present; changes in parenting from the early nineteenth century to the present that increasingly focused attention on the emotional relationship between parent and child; the twentieth-century rise of prenatal care and maternal education about embryonic growth; the twentieth-century blossoming of a consumer culture that marketed baby items to pregnant women; the abortion debates from the mid-twentieth century to the present; the late twentieth-century introduction of obstetric ultrasound and its evolution into a pregnancy ritual of “meeting the baby” as early as eight weeks’ gestation; and the late twentieth-century introduction of home pregnancy testing and the identification of pregnancy as early as several days before a missed period. The conclusion offers suggestions for how women and their families, health-care providers, and the maternity care industry can better handle pregnancy and address miscarriage.

Promoting astronomy in developing countries: an historical perspective

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (SPS5) ◽  
pp. 21-24
Author(s):  
Rajesh Kochhar
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Area ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Deficiency Syndrome ◽  
Multi Stage ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Astronomical Instrument

AbstractAny international effort to promote astronomy world wide today must necessarily take into account its cultural and historical component. The past few decades have ushered in an age, which we may call the Age of Cultural Copernicanism. In analogy with the cosmological principle that the universe has no preferred location or direction, Cultural Copernicanism would imply that no cultural or geographical area, or ethnic or social group, can be deemed to constitute a superior entity or a benchmark for judging or evaluating others.In this framework, astronomy (as well as science in general) is perceived as a multi-stage civilizational cumulus where each stage builds on the knowledge gained in the previous stages and in turn leads to the next. This framework however is a recent development. The 19th century historiography consciously projected modern science as a characteristic product of the Western civilization decoupled from and superior to its antecedents, with the implication that all material and ideological benefits arising from modern science were reserved for the West.As a reaction to this, the orientalized East has often tended to view modern science as “their” science, distance itself from its intellectual aspects, and seek to defend, protect and reinvent “our” science and the alleged (anti-science) Eastern mode of thought. This defensive mind-set works against the propagation of modern astronomy in most of the non-Western countries. There is thus a need to construct a history of world astronomy that is truly universal and unselfconscious.Similarly, the planetarium programs, for use the world over, should be culturally sensitive. The IAU can help produce cultural-specific modules. Equipped with this paradigmatic background, we can now address the question of actual means to be adopted for the task at hand. Astronomical activity requires a certain minimum level of industrial activity support. Long-term maintenance of astronomical equipment is not a trivial task. There are any number of examples of an expensive facility falling victim to AIDS: Astronomical Instrument Deficiency Syndrome. The facilities planned in different parts of the world should be commensurate with the absorbing power of the acceptor rather than the level of the gifter.

Diaspora Capitalism and the Homeland: Australian Chinese Networks into China

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-273
Author(s):  
Constance Lever-Tracy ◽  
David Ip
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores two new and related phenomena of the late twentieth century that will surely play a major role in shaping the world of the twenty-first: the economic development and opening up of China, and the emergence onto the world economic stage of diaspora Chinese businesses, producing a significant, identifiably Chinese current within global capitalism. Each of these has, we believe, been crucial and perhaps indispensable to the other.

Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World in the Late Twentieth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 256
Author(s):  
Frank Hodges ◽  
R. J. Johnston ◽  
Peter J. Taylor ◽  
Michael J. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Change ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

EXODUCTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Schechner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This essay by Richard Schechner dedicated to a mythical figure of the theater of the late twentieth century; a work of critical reconstruction that has contributed decisively to consolidating the legacy of Grotowski, just a few months after his death. In addition to fixing some essential terms of the vocabulary, together with the contents and the periodization of the Grotowskian work (aspects that Grotowski in life were entrusted exclusively to oral transmission), the essay retraces the formation of Grotowski, the aspects linked to his character, the specific forms of his research and his transmission of knowledge, the exercise of leadership, the role of his collaborators, the sources, the mystical side, his relationship with the spirit of time, the importance (and weakness) of his opera, in the history of twentieth century theater.

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