Schmalzer, Sigrid (Author)
University of California, San Diego
Esherick, Joseph
Pickowicz, Paul
Edition Details: Advisors: Esherick, Joseph; Paul Pickowicz
Physical Details: 653 pp.
Language: English
This is a history of two faces of the "popular science" of paleoanthropology in twentieth-century China. The first, science dissemination, has entailed the spread of knowledge produced by scientific experts to the general population. The second, mass science, was a far more radical, bottom-up approach that in the Mao era sought to make science itself more "popular" through mass participation in scientific work. In examining the dissemination of knowledge about human evolution and popular participation in paleoanthropological research. I approach from a new angle many established themes of twentieth- century Chinese history for example, modernity, imperialism, nationalism, ethnic identity, class struggle, and authoritarianism. I also raise two issues that have been much less well explored: popular science and human identity. Through a detailed investigation of the production of knowledge about human origins, this dissertation sheds new light on the changing ways Chinese people in the twentieth century saw themselves as natural, social, local, national, and global beings. Without disregarding forms of identity that have defined some people in contrast with others, I encourage scholars not to overlook the potential for more inclusive kinds of human identities. And without denying the enormous implications of discourses that blur the boundary between humans and others, I insist on the need to take seriously the continuing, though changing, attempts to define what it means to be human. The dissertation further demonstrates that none of the questions that occupied scientists and science policy makers in socialist China--questions of class or social identity, religion, utility, and objectivity, to name a few--were simple; none were mere fictions of the state or party; and none are resolved in the West today. Most importantly, I propose that Mao was right to think the masses had something to offer science, but that his commitment to seeing them simultaneously as "superstitious" precluded their full and meaningful participation in the production of scientific knowledge about human origins. Nonetheless, paleoanthropology in China has never been estranged from popular culture, but rather has depended on it in myriad unacknowledged ways. In popular paleoanthropology, we see seeds of the true promise of mass science.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/06 (2004): 2325. UMI pub. no. 3137238.
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