2021
Joan Judge
Guggenheim validates study of vernacular knowledge in 20th century China
2021
Guggenheim validates study of vernacular knowledge in 20th century China
For Joan Judge, winning the Guggenheim Fellowship – the only one awarded this year in East Asian Studies – is particularly validating. The York University professor, a cultural historian of modern print and knowledge, says she received “a lot of pushback” on her current book-length research project, “China’s Mundane Revolution: Cheap Print, Vernacular Knowledge, and Common Reading in the Long Republic, 1894-1955.”
Some scholars had advised her against pursuing work on “crappy old books,” she recalls. The Royal Society of Canada member studies daily-use texts that informed and shaped everyday life in 20th century China – texts that helped people manage their quotidian lives.
“So [the Guggenheim] was a real thumbs up for trying to get to this level of knowledge that has been largely neglected,” she says. “It does a lot for the field. To young scholars, it signals that this kind of work is valid.”
“It’s incredibly challenging to do this work,” she says, describing it as “digging under the structures that are better known,” such as the revolutions of 20th century China. Her sources are cheaply produced commercial texts that have generally not been included in major library collections. A challenge has been locating these materials—she now has a personal database of about 500 of them.
“Sometimes you have to stick to your guns,” she says of pursing research interests despite criticism. “I felt the more I uncovered these materials, and dug into their layered richness…I saw connections between the mundane and the momentous, between practical modes of reasoning and what we think of as science.” Her research stretches from the late 1890s to just before the Communist government took power in 1949.
“There was an intensive influx of foreign diseases, things, and ideas,” at the time, she says, as common readers – people with rudimentary literacy – dealt with the challenges of the era, including repeated Cholera outbreaks, the growth of opium production, and the introduction of new technologies such as electricity.
“I’ve taken a series of problems I’ve seen come up repeatedly and tried to get a sense of what these people knew. The premise is that what they knew was valuable because it was based on experience that they trusted. We can learn from what they learned, especially about Chinese medicine, Chinese approaches to nature and, by extension, bigger questions around knowledge and politics.”
These types of knowledge are ignored at a country’s peril, says Dr. Judge, drawing comparisons to Indigenous knowledge in Canada and elsewhere.
“The parallels with so many other types of Indigenous knowledge are very, very clear. We see that throughout the Western world with the degradation of the environment, which possibly wouldn’t have been what it is today if we had paid more attention to the way Indigenous people understood nature and interacted with nature and respected nature.
