We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, Dec 13, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for our last VMPEA workshop this fall. This workshop features:
Wang You
Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows | Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, UChicago
Who will be presenting the paper titled:
“Dike Dynamics: Farmers, Scholars, and Polder Design in Jiangnan, 1400-1810”
Discussant: Lucien Sun
PhD Candidate, Art History, UChicago
This workshop will take place in-person only. You can also find the pre-circulated paper here (password: dike).
Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.
We hope to see many of you there!
All the best,
Lucien and Taylor
Polder illustrations in Wang Zhen’s Agricultural Treatise (Nongshu), first published in 1313. Library of Congress.
Abstract:
Since at least the eleventh century, scholars in Jiangnan had debated over the best measure to engineer local waterscape. In its lowland, polders—arable land enclosed by dikes—were crucial to protect rice paddies from flooding and ensure agricultural harvest and economic prosperity. How to build dikes and optimize polder structure, thus, generated intensive scholarly attention.
By juxtaposing three hydraulic manuals, this study examines scholarly efforts to explore and promote proper dike-building techniques in Jiangnan’s lowland between roughly 1600 and 1850. In particular, it investigates two analytically distinctive but practically intertwined approaches to produce agricultural knowledge and build dikes—the external approach advanced by Confucian statesmen and the communal approach by some residential landowners. In the former approach, external authorities viewed rural communities as part of the problem and attempted to impose strict and universal dike standards over “lazy farmers” and discipline farmer-laborers via compulsory official powers. With hydraulic experiences accumulated over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rural communities informed a communal turn in scholarly knowledge production by the turn of the early nineteenth century. Refusing hydraulic standards set by external authorities, this communal approach to hydraulic know-how trusted farmers with their in situ knowledge and critical skills as best able to govern their own water systems; the faceless “idle” farmers in the earlier agronomic and hydraulic discussions were transformed into active agents of knowledge with relevant experience in waterscape management.
Bio:
Wáng Yōu 王悠 (she/they) is an economic and environmental historian of early modern and modern China. Her current book project, Collaboration amidst Conflict: Rural Communities and the Making of a Sustainable Waterscape in the Lower Yangzi Delta, 1500-1950, examines the everyday interactions of village women and men with water- and landscapes in China’s economic center through hydraulic institutions, agricultural knowledge production, and a gendered labor regime. She is also interested in continuing exploring the intertwinement of the environment, gender, and the market through the lens of vernacular religion and global trade.
Before coming to the University of Chicago as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Division, she received her doctoral degree in History from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2022. She is also an alumna of the University of Chicago (A.M. ’14) and Zhejiang University (Bachelor of Economics ’12).
Lucien Sun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. His dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between regional space and the visual culture of southern Shanxi in north China between the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. His most recent article centers around a woodblock print of Guan Yu excavated in Khara-Khoto and its connection to the vibrant regional visual culture of southern Shanxi. He is also interested in the art of book and how picture in its broad sense moved across space, borders, and visual media in medieval Eurasia. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, Shanghai. In 2017–18, he was a Sumitomo Corporation visiting student at the University of Tokyo studying Japanese collections of Chinese and East Asian art. This year, he is working as the COSI Rhoades Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago.
