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- Title
中國即田野― 畢士博及中國於二十世紀初期美國 學術界的地位.
- Authors
洪廣冀
- Abstract
In the history of Chinese art and the history of modern Chinese science, Carl Whiting Bishop’s (1881-1942) name frequently appears in a wide range of literature. Yet thus far no scholarly work has examined Bishop’s life and career, nor has his case been used to meet scholars’ rising interest in practices that make the production and circulation of scientific knowledge possible. Beginning with a survey of the ways in which Bishop appears in the existing literature, this essay emphasizes the importance of conducting a practicecentered study of Bishop, while at the same time arguing that the practicecentered approach alone can hardly deal with an academic worker like Bishop, who migrated from one field to another, struggling to acquire the cultural capital to secure a place for himself. Consequently, this essay uses the field theory proposed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), in the hope of avoiding analytical fragmentation or becoming trapped by naïve objectivism. This essay shows that living in an age when China was regarded as a “warehouse” full of curios, Bishop nonetheless did not consider himself a curio collector. Noticing the awareness of protecting and preserving Chinese fine art and cultural heritage in well-managed museums, together with an interest in using artifacts as clues to the origin and evolution of civilizations, Bishop sought to fashion himself as a researcher who used China as a field to explore broader issues both empirically and theoretically. The efforts that Bishop put to accumulate his economic, social, and cultural capital, together with his various experimentations in “self-fashioning,” earned him attention from elites in East Asian art history, a field that was beginning to take shape in the early twentieth century. Bishop quickly got a chance to lead the Smithsonian’s archaeological expedition to China, the first of its kind since the institution’s establishment in 1846, thus turning a new page both for his career and for the history of China-United States relations. Based on primary sources at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and the Freer Gallery of Art, this essay uses Bishop as a guide to unveil China’s place in American academia during the early twentieth century. Also, this essay seeks to develop a narrative that balances structure and agency, fieldwork and theorization, the local and the global, and the like. In so doing, this essay aims at contributing to the growing body of literature on the global history of science.
- Subjects
BISHOP, Carl Whiting, 1881-1942; EAST Asian arts
- Publication
New History / Xin Shixue, 2019, Vol 30, Issue 1, p117
- ISSN
1023-2249
- Publication type
Article