Report on the Second 2014 EH Workshop at Academia Sinica
Report on the Second 2014 EH Workshop at Academia Sinica (May 23, 2014)
by Marlon Zhu (Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica)
Dr. Peter Lavelle (羅繼磊), Post-doctoral Fellow, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, delivered a report titled “Empire of Trees: the Matter and Meaning of Trees in the Late Qing Northwest.” Focusing on the willow trees planted in the 1870s by Qing soldiers in the east part of Gansu Province (甘肅省), namely the “Willows of General Zuo (左公柳),” Dr. Lavelle argued that those trees (originally amounted 3.5 millions in numbers) could be considered not only as resources that provided to the natives, they further represented the Empire’s overcoming of a harsh environment where used to be no trees. The trees simultaneously served as fuel or building material to the natives; and, symbolically, they were significant as signs of state power and national unity.
Dr. Shao-li Lu (呂紹理), Professor of the Department of History, National Taiwan University, gave a report on the “Blight in Modern Taiwan and its Remedy (近代臺灣的「蟲害」及其防治工作).” Focusing on the introduction of pesticide residue to Taiwan in the Japanese colonial period in the early twentieth century, Professor Lu argued that the prevailing usage of these chemicals in agriculture in contemporary Taiwan could be counted as one of the colonial “legacies”. By knowledge on entomology and inorganic chemistry in the Japanese Empire, accompanied with new local official institutions in agriculture such as “Inspectors against Pest (害蟲巡視員)” from the Schools for Agriculture Promotion (農業講習學校), and the employment of the system of Baojia (保甲制度), there witnessed in Taiwan a great expansion of the usage of pesticide residue, both in variety and numbers, until the 1940s.
Dr. Shu-min Huang (黃樹民), Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, gave his review on John Connell and Eric Waddell’s Environment, Development, and Change in Rural Asia-Pacific: Between Local and Global. With this collection of essays in honor of Harold Brookfield, a professor in micro-geography, the two editors advocated a bottom-up perspective to examine globalization. In contrast to any monolithic narrative of the globalizing process, this new approach upholds the “cultural ecology,” which puts emphasis on local voices, local knowledge, local empiricism and local practice. Case studies dealing with examples, such as the agricultural dilemma in a Western Pacific island (Kiribati) and the changing production strategies of smallholders in oil palm plantations in Papua New Guinea, illustrate the new approach.
Dr. Chunghao Pio Kuo (郭忠豪), Post-doctoral Fellow of the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, introduced Rachel Landan’s Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. Landan has reiterated the world history with a “culinary” perspective. Chapters were arranged chronologically from the mastering of grains as staple food in ancient world from 20,000 to 300 B.C.E., to the globalization of middling food in the twentieth century. The rise of “modern cuisine,” the author argued, had reflected the fall the hierarchical principle in the middle age and in confluence with the rise of republicanism, liberal democracy, and socialism in modern time. The British Industrialization had created the “middling cuisine,” such as the easy-carrying white bread. In the end, Dr. Kuo gave some suggestions to the study of the food history.
(Special Note: News from the Association for East Asian Environmental History (AEAEH)，Website: www.aeaeh.org)
