Browsing by Subject "Jesuits"

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    Discovering Chinese Science and Technology: A Critical Review
    (BRILL, 2023-01-26) Zhang, Xin; History, School of Liberal Arts
    For most of the twentieth century, the investigation into the development of science and technology in China has been based on the assumption that China lacked the conditions to achieve that on its own before it was exposed to Western knowledge. The same assumption has led many inquiries into the search for shortcomings in Chinese civilization or the failure to embrace Western knowledge. It was only near the very end of the twentieth century that a breakthrough finally arrived to allow scholars to free themselves from the assumption. This article traces the history of the field as it evolved through nearly a century from denying China’s own identity to finally recognizing it. I aim to show, one of the main reasons many researchers had held this rather Western-centric view for nearly a century was to the influence of the “rise of the West” historical narrative, which dominated the discourse on world history. Only after the narrative was seriously questioned did we begin to witness significant changes in the field toward realizing China’s own achievements and historical trajectory in the development of science and technology.
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    Review of Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650
    (MIT Press, 2001) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    Blackburn proposes a new reading of the encounter between Jesuit and Indian in seventeenth-century New France. A work of historical anthropology driven by the insights and agenda of colonial discourse studies, Harvest of Souls sets out to show how the Jesuit missionary reports (transcribed, translated, and published between 1896 and 1901 by Reu-ben G. Thwaites as The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents) were implicated in the practice of colonialism. Her method is to “examine the intent, effect, and meaning of the texts in their entirety” (as opposed to more narrowly focused ethnographic or historical readings), searching for and exposing the “sedimented meanings that inhabit the Jesuit texts” in order to “situate these meanings in relation to the politics of colonial-ism and conversion” (8, 11). The Relations were not “just the byproducts of a political process,” they were “a more integral component of the politics of colonialism, because they expressed the themes, ideas and ideologies that served domination and justified the colonial endeavor.”