HMED Lunchtime Lecture Series - Marta Hanson

Title: "Knowing Hands: Hand-memory Techniques and Handy Knowledge in late-Ming (1368-1644) Daily-use Encyclopedias"

 

Abstract: The concept “Knowing hands” captures how pre-modern people used their hands in distinctly different ways: to think through things, such as macro-microcosm relationships, to think with, as in cognitive processing through “hand-memory techniques,” and to do things mindfully with “handy knowledge,” such as pulse taking, needling, massage, and ritual healing in medicine. This research lecture will cover the latter two dimensions of “knowing hands” specified in the subtitle; 1) hand-memory techniques – how humans use hands to aid their cognitive processing – and 2) handy knowledge – what knowledge is grasped corporeally and conceptually with hands and so considered “handy” enough to be embodied. 

 

To illustrate this two-part distinction, this lecture uses a range of examples from daily-use encyclopedias that began to be published in China from 1599 on to spread pragmatic knowledge to a wide audience spanning the “four occupations/peoples” (simen 四民): scholar-gentry and government officials (shi 士), Peasant farmers (nong 農), artisans and craftsmen (gong 工), and merchants and traders (shang 商). Hand-based knowledge became newly significant in this new genre of 17th-century daily-use encyclopedias as a means to attract a wider readership. 

 

Readers in turn had a new textual source for wide-ranging bodily practices where they could learn not only how to play music, do martial arts, and launch an arrow but also how to use their hands to calculate easily in the marketplace and also to divine quickly their immediate futures.