Science and State in Modern Asia
2-3 December 2010
Needham Research Institute, Cambridge
In cooperation with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden
Theme of the Workshop:
This workshop will explore two related issues in relation to Asia from early modern times to the 20th century:
1. The ways in which the forms taken by scientific activity and the institutions within which it took place have been shaped by evolving state structures and the changing ideologies which underpinned them in different regions of Asia in recent centuries.
2. The roles played by science and its practitioners, and by the wider social and political perception of these, in the shaping of Asian state structures and ideologies in the time period considered.
Workshop Programme
(Refreshments and a light lunch will be provided on both days)
DAY 1: Thursday, December 2, 2010
0930 Registration & Coffee and Tea
1000 Welcome and Opening (Christopher Cullen & Clinton Godart)
Session 1: Science and Monarchs in Early Modern Russia and China
1030-1115 Catherine Jami (SPHERE-UMR7219, CNRS, Paris)
"Imperial Initiative and Chinese Scholars' Interest in the Sciences during the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722)"
1115 Break
1130-1215 Irina Gouzevitch (Centre Maurice Halbwachs, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris.)
"The Academy of Science of Saint-Petersburg in the Early 18th Century, or how to organize a European-like Research in an Illiterate Country".
Lunch 1230-1330
Session 2: Medicine and Modernization
1330-1415 Hormoz Ebrahimnejad (Department of History, University of Southampton)
'The Mechanisms of the Medical Modernisation in Nineteenth-Century Iran”
1415-1500 Susan Burns (Department of History, The University of Chicago)
"Spirit Techniques (霊術), Neurasthenia, and Psychiatry in Japan”
Break
Session 3: Nature and the State in Wartime Japan
1515-1600 Ian Jared Miller (Department of History and Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University)
“The Science of Sacrifice in Wartime Japan: Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoo, 1943”
1600-1645 G. Clinton Godart (Needham Research Institute and Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge)
“Evolutionary Theory and the State in Early Shōwa Japan (1930-1945)”
1900 Dinner for presenters and invited guests at Robinson College
DAY 2 Friday, December 4, 2010
Session 4: Science and the Modern State in India and China
0930-1015 Druv Raina (Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
“Jai Singh and state patronage of science in Late Mughal India”
1015-1100 Benjamin Zachariah (Department of History, University of Sheffield)
“Science, technology and the developmental imagination in post-independence India”
Break
1115-1200 Jiri Hudecek (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and Needham Research Institute)
“Governing the Queen of the Sciences: the Party, the State and the Institute of Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1949-1966”
1200-1245 Concluding Discussion
Lunch
Abstracts of the presentations can be found on the website of the Needham Research Institute (www.nri.org.uk)
All Welcome!
The Needham Research Institute is at 8 Sylvester Road, Cambridge CB3 9AF (just at the corner of Herschel and Sylvester Roads, behind Robinson College). Telephone: 01223 311545. For any queries, please contact the Institute Administrator, Susan Bennett, sjb58@cam.ac.uk.