The Yuan Dynasty Disasters: How Local Knowledge Influences Information
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
So I'm interested in how the sciences develop out of action and how knowledge actually begins with very local action. I'll give you one example for this. Every morning when you get up, you take your breakfast
00:21
and you go to work and you communicate with your colleagues. You develop an understanding of the world that surrounds you, of nature, of society, of climate, of weather, of the many questions that the sciences are concerned with nowadays. You do not only become part of the data collection
00:43
that allows these scientists to develop understandings about nature and the weather. I am interested in following up this local development of knowledge in the long duration. And because I'm a historian of China, I look in particular at this culture
01:01
and how it develops and constructs ideas of local knowledge. And for that, I look into a particular corpus of texts that Chinese scholars call the local gazetteers. These local gazetteers gather such information
01:20
over the long duration, beginning in the 7th century, up until today. In this corpus of texts, which the Chinese call the local gazetteers, there are loads of data in different structures that allow us to look at a question about,
01:42
for instance, how disasters emerge and what disasters actually mean and what kind of disasters actually count as local knowledge or become part of a larger discourse about disasters, weather, and climate. In order to look at that large corpus,
02:01
I need methods that help me to sort through the data and preserve the context in which they were generated and that defines their meaning. I am using digital humanities as a way to make that work. So to allow the historian both to preserve the details of the information about a specific context
02:23
in which people think about disasters and to see that within the larger picture of how other people looked at disasters. In the Yuan dynasty case, this is particularly interesting because it has categories of disasters at some places
02:40
that it didn't have in other periods. And it generates through this discourse a very specific idea about this period being disastrous. One example is mulberry disasters. Mulberries are very important because they are the important fodder for silk production,
03:01
for the sericulture, the worm, the caterpillar to eat. In the Yuan dynasty, it turns into a major disaster threatening the dynasty and threatening also the people's life and survival.
03:20
So historians are always most excited when they have a surprising result. And I actually had a very surprising result. From my previous knowledge, I knew that I should have data sets both from the north of China and the south of China in this period, because in this period, these two regions were central to the production of silk
03:42
and thus also to mulberry plantations. However, I found only data in the north and I basically found no data in the south. This was very surprising and hence I checked many ideas about how that could have happened.
04:01
For instance, different weather, probably social structures, communication didn't work. After checking that, however, I realized it couldn't be weather and obviously it was a historical, political manipulation that happened, but it hadn't happened in the 13th century
04:22
when these disasters had occurred and were initially documented. Rather, it happened 200 years later in the 15th to 16th century, when obviously one group of scholars in the north had decided that mulberry disasters
04:40
of the Yuan dynasty were particularly important. They were particularly important to defame this dynasty's ability to prevent disasters and harm from the people and hence had started to systematically collect that information and to continue the collection of this information
05:01
throughout the following generation. Thus, from decade to decade and from century to century, the north became, by documentation, a very disastrous region with lots of disasters happening all the time,
05:20
but in the south they seemingly decided that they didn't need to initially record those disasters in the 15th century and hence the succeeding generations also did not observe such disasters and did not record them as well.
05:42
In the 20th century, and this is the historical jump you have to make here, a Chinese climatologist called Zhu Kezhen looked at these historical data to understand global climate in a larger framework. This data was manipulated.
06:04
It was politically manipulated and he used it to develop his understanding of climate research. Even though this model was very quickly disintegrating under scientific research,
06:20
the idea, the hypothesis remained as the idea of a little ice age that may have happened in China before the big European ice age in the 15th century. Hence geologists, climatologists, people who are interested in hydraulics began to integrate it
06:41
and consider it in their scientific research. From all this, you can learn something about local knowledge and its relation to scientific understanding and development. Local knowledge does not exist out of the blue. Take the example of a disaster. Many things happen nowadays also with us
07:02
that we could consider to be a personal disaster, a social disaster, a disaster in a city. That disaster is relevant only if it exists within a reference framework that makes it familiar with other experiences. And this familiarity is also created over time.
07:23
If in one region you consider a mulberry tree dead, a disaster that may be your personal disaster, it becomes data only when others also see it as a disaster and thus start to record it, document it, preserve it,
07:41
collect it, and thus also become very sensitive so they have a reference framework for that disaster and pay attention to it. And this is how local knowledge, and this is what we can understand from this context, is not devoid of a reference frame.
08:01
It needs this reference frame in order to be valid as true knowledge. So where do I want to bring this research from here? For once, the local gazetteers certainly do not only offer information about my surprise find in disasters,
08:21
they offer similar understandings of the dynamics of data generation or what is even more interesting, the generation of local knowledge as a valid reference framework in fields such as agriculture, social network, what is considered to be a talent,
08:41
how is expertise valued, or what is a local environment for instance. Another level that I'm very interested in is to understand how a genre such as the local gazetteers through its sheer existence generates concepts,
09:00
how it generates structures of information like our modern databases. So once you have created a database, this is how you can imagine it, you constantly have to feed it with information, you work within that syntax and through that syntax you understand your reality.
09:22
It is these processes that I try to understand by looking further into local gazetteers.