Organizer: Hajime Nakatani, University of Chicago
Discussant and Chair: Stephen J. Goldberg, Hamilton College
In recent years, the body emerged as a central concern in various fields of cultural analysis. However, critical focus on the materiality of the body has not always attended to the body’s cultural and historical conditions. In the modern Western context, the figure of the body came to the fore mainly as a remedy to the subject/object divide that pushed the body outside of the thinkable. By confronting our conception of the body to its Chinese counterparts, the papers in this panel analyze the different conditions in which the body comes to the fore in the Chinese context and explore alternative ways to conceptualize embodiment.
Through an exploration of Xunzi’s objections to physiognomics, Jane Geaney’s paper argues that in ancient China the body manifested itself in an audible/visible dyad, rather than a mind/body split that is dominant in mainstream Western philosophy.
Hajime Nakatani continues the discussion of physiognomics in an examination of how the "discovery" of the palpable body lead Qing physiognomic manuals to devise novel ways to attribute significance to an increasingly opaque materiality of the face.
Angela Zito attempts to map the emergence of a palpable body in a number of Ming-Qing texts. She argues that in philosophy, literature, and ritual, Qing writers began to emphasize the embodied experience of the concrete body.
Finally, Hsiang-lin Lei explores the twentieth century Chinese medicine’s encounter with Western conception of the material body in his paper on the re-mapping of Chinese medical concepts on Western medical conception of the natural world.
Audible and Visible Body in Ancient China
Jane Geaney, University of Richmond
Xunzi objects to using physiognomics to interpret human fortunes for two reasons. First, he says, the heart-mind (xin1) dominates the form (xing2), which implies that the visible form cannot be counted on to reveal the invisible heart-mind. Second, he says, the reason people encounter misfortune is not due to their visible form, but to an incompleteness of their hearing and seeing.
Xunzi’s contrast of the heart-mind to the xing2 may misleadingly suggest a mind/body split. But xing2 is often contrasted with other things such as shen, qing and de. Moreover, the contrast with the xin1 is not prevalent enough for this pattern to be a definitive illustration of the human structure.
By analyzing references to sense perception and the character xing2 in the ancient Chinese philosophical classics, this paper explicates Xunzi’s two reasons through a different model of the human subject. In ancient China, the predominant presentation of the body involved an aural/visual dyad. Most of the references to the physical senses in these texts single out the ear and eye, and match them as a pair. The ear discriminates names, words, and reputation; the eye discriminates action and movements of the form (xing2). This explains both Xunzi’s rejection of the visible/invisible dyad and his replacement of that with a visible/audible dyad. This matching also explains the obscure reference to xingming in Mozi 69/4, and it may have significance for the term shiming.
The Meaning of Forms: The Contingency of Human Appearance in Qing Physiognomics
Hajime Nakatani, University of Chicago
How adequately does the face represent a person? The anxiety expressed in this question arises as a recognition of the contingency of appearance: the impressions faces stamp on us may be always already contaminated by prejudices and over-generalizations that cloud our perception of the particular person. And yet, the human visage does not cease to captivate us with its shades of significance. Such admixture of fascination and skepticism, which marks our modern horizon of physiognomic consciousness, finds its analogue in Chinese attempts to read the face. This paper will explore the effects of a comparable "discovery of contingency" in the Chinese physiognomic manuals produced between ca. 1650–ca. 1830.
Critical attitudes toward physiognomies were expressed early on in China (e.g., Xunzi). But it was only later in the Ming-Qing, when physiognomies sought to transcend its "folk-practice" status to achieve discursive legitimacy, that the question of the contingency of appearance became central within physiognomic discourse. In physiognomic manuals, the problematics of contingency was primarily registered in the ambivalent status of the concept of xing2 (concrete features, tangible form). In place of the older general framework of an expressive cosmology in which the significance of concrete facial details was securely inscribed, post-1600 physiognomies began to exhibit contradictory tendencies, multiplying ever-more detailed tables of feature-types while simultaneously downplaying xing2 to stress the importance of the "heart/mind." In their attempts to circumscribe the potential arbitrariness of physiognomic judgments, the manuals were led to systematically discover the problematic relations of stasis/movement, surface/expression, physiognomic details/general facial impression.
Palpability, Visibility and the Revaluation of Bodily Capacity in Ming-Qing China
Angela Zito, Columbia University
In a number of domains, new discourses of palpability, visibility and physicality in the Ming-Qing period incited the development of emphases upon embodied experience as a new basis for knowledge. Travel writing; schools of painting from life; new forms of medical diagnosis; a rejection of Buddhism as too idealist and abstract in favor of emphasis upon the material circulation of qi, a concomitant turn toward a re-revival of ritual protocols from the deep pre-Buddhist past; kaozheng scholarship; a boom in erotic literature; interest in masculine/feminine difference and, of course, wage labor, all point to a new emphasis upon the body’s capacity to perform. This shift did not require the discovery of the already-present materiality of the fleshly body. Rather, thinkers in the materialist ontological vein of the Qing changed the situational logics of their thinking, thus changing the possibilities for objects thought. I will explore the themes of palpability/visibility in thinker Wang Fuzhi, ritualist Ling Tingkan, and writer Li Yu (his Camal Prayer Mat). I wish to begin to build a case for the play across domains of practice (daoxue, ritualism, erotic writing) of certain discursive regularities upon which any claim for epochal difference, and hence historical change, must rest. I will also broach the necessary question: how many "new bodies" were there? What new things were they thought capable of accomplishing?
When Words Lost Their Referents: Scientizing Chinese Medicine in Early Twentieth-Century China
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, University of Chicago
What would happen to a language, if the world it previously described suddenly ceased to exist? A generation of traditional Chinese doctors lived through this apparently bizarre scenario in the early 1930s when they started embracing the project of Scientizing Chinese Medicine. As the Chinese doctors accepted the discourse of modernity, a discourse which presumes the unique, eternal, and trans-cultural characters of the natural world, they encountered great difficulty in re-associating this new world with the deeply entrenched concepts of Chinese medicine, Qi, Yin, Yang, Blood, Wind, etc.
To examine this crucial ontological/linguistic break, this paper will answer three questions. First, how did Chinese doctors in the late 19th century articulate the immaterial and invisible word of Qihua (Qi Transformation) in opposition to that of Western anatomy? Second, how did this enduring demarcation between two medical worlds evolve into a demarcation between Qihua and germ theory and then finally collapse in the early 1930s as Chinese doctors started struggling against Western-style doctors in the field of the state? Third, how did Chinese doctors, in the name of scientizing Chinese medicine, strive to re-map the Chinese medical terms onto the world which had been constituted anew by the language of Western science and medicine? In light of Latourian symmetric anthropology, this paper examines how the asymmetric ontological/linguistic relationship between Western and Chinese medicine was established in practice when Chinese medicine encountered the modern state in the 1930s.