Introduction／

演講一

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.

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