Book ID: CBB625883025

Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (2022)

unapi

Making sense of nature in one of the world’s most contested borderlands. According to Chinese government reports, hundreds of plague-infected rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county on an April night in 1952. Chinese scientists determined that these flying voles were not native to the region, but were vectors of germ warfare, dispatched over the border by agents of imperialism. Mastery of biology had become a way to claim political mastery over a remote frontier. Beginning with this bizarre incident from the Korean War, Knowing Manchuria places the creation of knowledge about nature at the center of our understanding of a little-known but historically important Asian landscape.  At the intersection of China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia, Manchuria is known as a site of war and environmental extremes, where projects of political control intersected with projects designed to make sense of Manchuria’s multiple environments. Covering more than 500,000 square miles, Manchuria’s landscapes include temperate rainforests, deserts, prairies, cultivated plains, wetlands, and Siberian taiga. With analysis spanning the seventeenth century to the present day, Ruth Rogaski reveals how an array of historical actors—Chinese poets, Manchu shamans, Russian botanists, Korean mathematicians, Japanese bacteriologists, American paleontologists, and indigenous hunters—made sense of the Manchurian frontier. She uncovers how natural knowledge, and thus the nature of Manchuria itself, changed over time, from a sacred “land where the dragon arose” to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic “wasteland” to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation.

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Reviewed By

Review Yulia Frumer (2023) Review of "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 160-161). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB625883025/

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Authors & Contributors
Generali, Dario
Arch, Jakobina
Sonia Hirt
Asrih, Lena
Butler, Christina Rae
Landais, Benjamin
Concepts
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Science and politics
Nature
Environmental history
Science and society
Environment
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
21st century
17th century
Early modern
Places
Italy
Europe
United States
South Carolina (U.S.)
Pacific Ocean
North America
Institutions
School of Milan
World Wildlife Fund
Habsburg, House of
Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main
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