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How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian Countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe?
This series of essays organized into sections on Jesuit Circuits of Communication and Publication; Jesuit World Maps in Chinese; Reverberations of Matteo Ricci's Maps in East Asia; and Reflections on the Curation of Cartographic Knowledge, go a long way toward answering these questions about the shaping of our modern understandings of the world.
Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880) provides a broad spectre of early modern manifestations of human fascination with fish – “fish” understood in the early modern sense of the term, as aquatilia: all aquatic animals, including sea mammals and crustaceans. It addresses the period’s quickly growing knowledge about fish in its multiple, varied and rapidly changing interaction with culture. This topic is approached from various disciplines: history of science, cultural history, history of collections, historical ecology, art history, literary studies, and lexicology. Attention is given to the problematic questions of visual and textual representation of fish, and pre- and post-Linnean classification and taxonomy. This book also explores the transnational exchange of ichthyological knowledge and items in and outside Europe.

Contributors: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.
Translating Technology in Africa brings together authors from different disciplines who engage with Science and Technology Studies (STS) to stimulate curiosity about the diversity of sociotechnical assemblages on the African continent. The contributions provide detailed praxeographic examinations of technologies at work in postcolonial contexts. The series of 5 volumes aims to catalyse the development of a field of research that is still in its infancy in Africa and promises to offer novel insights into past, present, and future challenges and opportunities facing the continent. The first volume, on "Metrics", explores practices of quantification and digitisation. The chapters examine how numbers are aggregated and how the resulting metrics shape new realities.

Contributors include Kevin. P. Donovan, Véra Ehrenstein, Jonathan Klaaren, Emma Park, Helen Robertson, René Umlauf and Helen Verran

Abstract

Two Latin manuscripts in Oxford and Florence preserve diverging recensions of a previously unnoticed astronomical treatise beginning Infra signiferi poli regionem (Oxford recension) or Circulorum alius est sub quo (Florence recension). It can be shown that this anonymous text was originally intended to accompany the Tables of Marseilles in Raymond of Marseilles’s twelfth-century Liber cursuum planetarum (ca. 1141). While the core tables for planetary longitudes in this set were founded on Ptolemy’s kinematic models, as known from the Almagest, this new source frequently deviates from the Ptolemaic norm, for instance by explicitly rejecting an epicyclic explanation of planetary stations and retrogradations. In place of the latter, it argues in favour of a heliodynamic theory inspired by Roman sources such as Pliny, which underwent certain developments in the works of twelfth-century Latin writers such as William of Conches. Rather than being wholly exceptional, these features are indicative of a degree of disconnect between planetary theory and computational practice in twelfth-century Latin astronomy, which is also detectable in other sources from this period.

Open Access
In: Early Science and Medicine
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Abstract

Texts from pre-imperial and early imperial China are replete with dietary information, regimens for nourishing the body and instructions on how not to soil its inner purity. Sources have far less to say about the body’s effluvia and the waste and muck that is shed and excreted by human and non-human animals. This article studies references to excreta and excretion in early China. It shows how human and animal faeces as well as the locus of excretion connoted both negative and positive spheres. Excreta were deemed noxious yet also beneficial, they were to be discarded yet also reused. Latrines were liminal zones, operating at the intersection of social propriety and physical and moral rejection. The process of excretion made the body vulnerable to external influences such as demonic illness, yet faecal matter of itself also had medicinal healing powers. In agriculture, matter exuded was matter used to fecundate and fertilize crops. The waste and human nightsoil that accumulated in the concealed domestic space of the latrine and pigpen ended up as sought-after produce infusing life into seeds, fields, and public productivity. By bringing together evidence across a range of textual and material sources – from latrines, to pigs, to a line in the Laozi 老子 and its commentaries – this article traces excretory experience and matter through its cycle from defecation to regeneration.

Open Access
In: East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine
In: Early Science and Medicine
Author:

Abstract

By focusing on the concept of ‘complexion’ in the major medieval Latin commentaries on Aristotle’s so-called De animalibus, this paper identifies and analyzes a case of the use of the concept of ‘complexion’ outside the medical context or, more precisely, at the intersection of natural philosophy and medicine. The preliminary survey undertaken in this paper suggests that ‘complexion’ was a key concept of the De animalibus tradition, i.e., the principle used to explain, in a unified manner, the issues at stake in the medieval scientia de animalibus. The paper further reflects on the reasons why the notion of ‘complexion’ could have served as an organizational principle of the themes treated in the De animalibus commentaries and on the role that the earliest medieval commentaries on the De animalibus themselves could have played in shaping some of the prominent features of the medieval conceptualization of ‘complexion.’

Open Access
In: Early Science and Medicine

Abstract

According to the medical tradition, the temperament of bodies came from the balance of their primary qualities – hot, cold, dry, and moist. However, physicians associated additional sensory properties with temperament in the field of pharmacology. These sensations included taste, color, and odor, which allow an appraisal of the constitution and active powers of drugs. The present paper examines this theme in late-Renaissance medicine, through the accounts of the French physician Jean Fernel (ca. 1497–1558) and the Italian physician Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603). As will be shown, their respective interpretations of drug “faculties” offered original views on the relationship between temperament, sensory properties, and matter theories. Such discussions, in turn, revealed the Renaissance reception of Arabic-Latin pharmacology, Galenic medicine, and the Aristotelian physics of matter and form.

Open Access
In: Early Science and Medicine
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Abstract

This article examines Japanese experiments concerning the power of “thoughtography,” demonstrating how sensory disagreements between psychologists and physicists were concretized through divergent gendered personae within contested spaces of experiment. Specifically, I analyze thoughtography as a story of conflicts between personae of “gentleman” and “detective” within the private, nuclear-familial home of the “housewife.” In the early twentieth century, the psychological laboratory had yet to establish its authority in Japan. Successful experiment thus required visiting subjects and navigating the intersensorial spaces of their homes. The strategies through which researchers adapted to homes, and the strategies by which housewives manipulated homes to their advantage, reveal contestations over how to look, touch, and feel in the presence of others. They furthermore reveal that the drive to emulate “Western science” met with contradictions in “Westernization” itself, particularly between demands concerning new protocols of masculine scholarly sociability and the prerogatives of the bourgeois wife and mother.

Open Access
In: Nuncius
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Abstract

The chapter inquires into the duality of metrics in contemporary Yorùbá life. I begin with an experience had by the author in a Yorùbá primary school classroom in a southwestern Nigerian city where a class of children near the end of their primary school career showed expert capacity in working the two very different metrics of contemporary Yorùbá life together. This ethnographic story provides a framing and offers preliminary data. In the body of the chapter, first I summarise the very different arithmetical workings of the Yorùbá language metric compared to the standard modern decimal system taught in schools and associated with English language. Then I show how numbers sit in the workings of Yorùbá language quite differently than the way decimal numbers sit in the English language. In making something of these differences, after briefly developing the idea that as cultural resources, metrics are linguistic-arithmetical meshes which have life through the sociomaterial happening of numbers in the here and now, I present accounts of bilingual children telling how they see differences between the metrics—literally; they tell of having an embodied sensibility of difference between Yorùbá numbers and decimal numbers. I relate the felt sociomaterial differences to difference between iconic and indexical numbers, noting iconic numbers feature in trade, whereas indexical numbers feature in experimental science.

Open Access
In: Translating Technology in Africa. Volume 1: Metrics