Suchergebnisse

Recent scholarship on the history of science in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has provided new horizons for exploring questions about the nature and epistemology of socialist science, its epistemic virtues, its knowledge-producing practices, its geographical imagination and networks of communication and exchange, and its relations to the Chinese state and state building. In this essay the author uses a focus on practice to extrapolate implications and tendencies that he sees as unifying recent studies, and he clarifies their contributions to the current understanding of the history of science in the PRC. Particularly with respect to Chinese state-science relations and the nature of Maoist mass science, a focus on practice illuminates how recent scholarship has queried and interrogated unitary conceptions of the Chinese state and science, highlighted transnational connections and movements, and deepened our understanding of Maoist mass science.

This article seeks to illuminate the field of social and material relations that generated and were generated by the Vitasoy milk bottle. When Vitasoy began making and selling soybean milk in 1940, the materiality of the milk bottle underscored and participated in assembling producers and consumers in both productive and problematic ways. The milk bottle was a material instantiation of a pattern of desires closely associated with global modernity that gestured beyond the geographical specificity of Hong Kong to an idealized community of rational, health-minded milk drinkers. As a marker of hygienic modernity and a badge of humanitarian relief and nutritional activism, the milk bottle conveyed seemingly universal ideals about health and fitness and materially affirmed the new idea that soybean milk was a dairy substitute. How the Vitasoy milk bottle could perform such functions requires disentangling the multiple lines of influence, local and global, that helped make the milk bottle meaningful.

The Shanghai Refugee Children Nutritional Aid Committee, formed in 1937, sought to improve refugee children's nutritional health by making and distributing a scientifically tested soybean milk and soybean cakes. By 1942, the Committee had adopted a national platform and changed its moniker to the Chinese Nutritional Aid Council, with plans to open offices and nutrition clinics in Chongqing, Chengdu, Guiyang and Kunming. This paper argues that in linking biomedical understandings of nutrition with social change, this group of Western-trained physicians and young female social workers enacted a new kind of social activism, one which seized upon the food-as-fuel idea and staked the welfare of the nation upon the nutritional health of its citizenry. In contrast to earlier social relief projects promoted by the imperial state and the local philanthropic initiatives of gentry elites, the Chinese Nutritional Aid Committee articulated an image of professional and specialised expertise in the science of nutrition and care. Theirs was a project of modern refashioning in which science played a key and foundational role in crafting their understanding of both relief and the children they aimed to save.

Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia' investigates how foods came to be established as moral entities, how moral food regimes reveal emerging systems of knowledge and enforcement, and how these developments have contributed to new Asian nutritional knowledge regimes. The collection's focus on cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons across Asia brings into view a broad spectrum of modern Asia that extends from East Asia, Southeast Asia, to South Asia, as well as into global communities of Western knowledge, practice, and power outside Asia.0The first section, "Good Foods," focuses on how food norms and rules have been established in modern Asia. Ideas about good foods and good bodies shift at different moments, in some cases privileging local foods and knowledge systems, and in other cases privileging foreign foods and knowledge systems. The second section, "Bad Foods," focuses on what makes foods bad and even dangerous. Bad foods are not simply unpleasant or undesirable for aesthetic or sensory reasons, but they can hinder the stability and development of persons and societies. Bad foods are symbolically polluting, as in the case of foreign foods that threaten not only traditional foods, but also the stability and strength of the nation and its people. The third section, "Moral Foods," focuses on how themes of good versus bad are embedded in projects to make modern persons, subjects, and states, with specific attention to the ambiguities and malleability of foods and health. The malleability of moral foods provides unique opportunities for understanding Asian societies' dynamic position within larger global flows, connections, and disconnections