2025 年 2 月 24 日

講座公告

「The natural world in early China: a cultural and political ecology」英國國家學術院院士胡司德教授系列講座

第五屆客座講座教授

胡司德（Roel Sterckx）｜英國國家科學院院士

屬與政大文學院國際漢學碩博士專班合辦之重點領域課程，學分課程整體相關資訊，請見：自然史與醫療史新視野

「The natural world in early China: a cultural and political ecology」系列演講：

Coming

演講(一) Why dragons change: the non-human animal in early China 龍何以幻化？中國古代的非人動物

In his much-acclaimed novel The Temptation of the West (La Tentation de l’Occident), André Malraux (1901-76) stages a fictitious correspondence between a young Frenchman travelling through China in the 1920’s, and his young Chinese friend who is visiting Europe at the same time. In one of the letters, the Chinese correspondent comments on the relationship between a painter and a cat that forms the object to be painted. He tells his European correspondent: “The idea of species is for you [Europeans] quite abstract; it allows you to classify; it is a means toward knowledge. In us [Chinese] it is closely connected with our sensibility. …”. In this lecture we test Malraux’s hypothesis by examining early Chinese classifications of the animal world and portrayals of the human-animal relationship in early Chinese texts.

演講(二) Natural environments in early Chinese thought 中國古代思想中的自然環境

Early China’s masters of philosophy and the texts they are associated with are increasingly quoted in order to trace the origins of a Chinese environmental consciousness to its distant past. By locating ideas on environmental protection and sustainable development to China’s classical age, the claim is that Chinese philosophy and China’s religious traditions offer an ideal framework for the relationship between human beings and the environment. The argument runs that the ancient Chinese did not insist on the domination and utilisation of nature. In this lecture we will examine the value of such idealized insistence on nature-man harmony against the historical and social context of Warring States and Han society.

演講(三) Domesticating the soil: early Chinese agronomy and the figure of the peasant 土壤的馴化：中國古代農學與農民

In his classic Xiangtu Zhonguo 鄉土中國 (“From the Soil”, 1948) Fei Xiaotong describes farmers as “hayseeds” who “root themselves in one place like a plant”. Early China’s fields and those who worked them have left a deep imprint on historical and contemporary perceptions of Chinese civilisation. Yet, despite the central place of agriculture in early Chinese society, the corpus of early texts dealing with agronomy is relatively modest. In this lecture we offer some possible explanations for this and examine the social circumstances that led to the articulation of specialized knowledge-domains. In the second part we propose that figurative language played a key role in the transmission of agronomic knowledge and examine the figure of the farmer in its multiple dimensions as an economic agent, idealized laborer, and moral exemplar.

工作坊 “Pigs and human bodies: a short history of waste in early China” 豬隻與人體：中國古代肥料簡史

Early Chinese texts discuss diet, regimens for nourishing the body and methods to cultivate its inner purity. These sources have less to say about the body’s effluvia and the organic waste shed and excreted by human and non-human animals. In this workshop we will examine references to excreta and excretion in early China. We are interested in the discourse on what gets “discarded”. We will explore how excreta were deemed noxious yet also beneficial. The process of excretion made the body vulnerable to external influences such as demonic illness, yet fecal matter itself also had medicinal healing powers. In agriculture, waste and human nightsoil that accumulated in the domestic space were used to fertilize crops and infuse life into seeds, fields, and public productivity. We will examine textual and archaeological evidence and trace excretory experience and the treatment of waste through its cycle from defecation to regeneration.