Fusion of two images: "Dyers scraping stenciled fabrics," figure 235, Hommel & Mercer, China at Work 1937, and "Indian indigo-dye worker," photo A. Mamidipudi, 2017.
Dept. III
Artifacts, Action, Knowledge
Director Dagmar Schäfer
T +49 30 22667 151
Established in 2013, Department III studies the history of knowledge and action. The two main areas of interest are the processes and structures that lead to varying configurations of collaborative and individual bodies of knowledge as well as the changing role of artifacts—texts, objects, and spaces—in the creation, diffusion, and use of scientific and technological knowledge. The department currently pursues two research themes: Histories of Planning (since 2013) and The Body of Animals (since 2016). The former operates with action as an entry point. The latter sets out from artifacts. These conceptual approaches are complemented by a critical engagement with source-based research. In addition to individual projects, Working Groups are dedicated, at different levels of detail, to gathering together scholars interested in specific issues within larger themes.
鉛之與丹，異類殊色，而可以為丹者，
得其數也。故繁稱文辭，無益於說，
審其所由而已矣。
“Although different in kind and color, lead, when
participating in vermillion making (cinnabar), can
function as vermillion. One has to grasp its ‘inner
workings’ (shu 數). Therefore, that which can be said
is not effectuated by intricate formula and elegant
phrases. Simply test the causes and that is that.”
Huainanzi Writings of the Masters, South of Huainan, 2nd century
Inspired by the Huainanzi’s explanation of vermillion production, Department III seeks to understand how people historically approached things and their “inner workings” in action and thought. In this core text of Han-Chinese statecraft, a major reference point for cosmological speculations, things testify to the materiality of existence that cuts across every domain of life and is nigh on impossible to escape. The things of the Huainanzi are everywhere. We interrogate this ubiquity by investigating how the materiality of existence impacts knowing or reflects what one knows. Our focus of analysis is on processes: how one understands inner workings when making things work or imagining such ways of working. In other words, our aim is to develop a historical epistemology of action. Our research agenda has three entry points:artifacts (things), action (making), and knowledge (work).
Artifacts (things)
What “knowledge” inhabits the Huainanzi’s myriad things, such as plants, ghosts, or stones? Without inquiring into life and artifacts and their boundaries and intersections we cannot fully understand what it means to know. Historians mainly engage with things that populate the human world via their material remains. As historians of science, we study the artifacts of human action and thought as sources, mediators, and products of scientific and technological change and question their boundaries in terms of materialism, material culture studies, materiality, and the ontological turn.Our research considers that all knowledge and knowing processes relate to materiality or have a material component far beyond the artifacts that remain. Hence, it is important to ask how people make things work.
Action (making)
How does one “know” as a process? Historically ephemeral, action leaves behind a residue of its most important reference points, imaginable as the pillars circumscribing the void of a room. The pillars are manifest in histories of codification: how textual, material, and visual means represent and explain “knowing” in different cultures and historical situations. The ceiling is formed by a scaffold of beams, interlocked by causality, correlation, or methodological assumptions of a category of knowledge, its consistency and expressions. Our focus is on the otherwise non-descript space: howpeople deal with the void and how they grasp it through approximation, inference, orestimation, or respond to its uncertainty, or even not-knowing. We analyze judgements and modes of decision-making by looking at how relations were drawn through management, organizational forms, or systemic choices. Thus, we unfold all that constitutes the room.
Knowledge (work)
What kind of work is it to make “knowledge”? Knowledge-making is work for brain and brawn. By emphasizing the physical side, our aim is to push the historical analysis of what and how people knew beyond the written traces of practices and the material remnants of products. We look into the varying conceptual roles of “action” as “knowing” and ask for the use histories of terms such as: техника, and సుళువులు, మెలకువలు, what are the methodological capacities of such concepts and their roles in the politics of knowledge, past and present?
News & Press
Publications & Digital Resources
N° 496
Dagmar Schäfer Zhao, Lu Lackner, Michael (2019)
This preprint is a glossary of uncertainty, closely connected to six specific case studies, which provides an insight into diverse uncertainties and coping methods that were historically discussed and practiced in China and Japan. When people encountered unknowingness or uncertainty in various historical periods, these endeavors were processed in ways that some called predicting, and others thought of as plans or ways to “think ahead”. Still other notions had a very particular character, so not all forms of accounting for and framing the not-yet-known were transferrable beyond an individual example or region. Yet what such forms of explanation often seem to have had in common was a wide range of material formats: in attempts to predict or plan, people may have been less concerned about truthfulness than they were with finding traceable patterns—seeking reliability in repetition.
N° 486
Elisabeth Hsu Chee Han Lim (2016)
The Yiji jing 易筋經 (The Canon for Supple Sinews) of 1624 describes martial training currently practiced, particularly in Chinese communities. This article compares two forms that the two co-authors learnt in different places: Singapore and Kunming in the People's Republic of China. One form is known as the Hong Fist (hongguan洪拳) version of the Yijin jing, the other was taught as a form of qigong 氣功. This article focuses on the training of the authors in their respective practice. It demonstrates that the techniques learned instilled in the authors an attentiveness to the meanings that shaped their practice. These meanings were not primarily comprehended in a cognitive fashion but felt and experienced. In particular, the materiality of the environment, or more precisely the resistances that the environment posed to a practitioner, appear to have shaped the practice of the Yijin jing in distinctive ways. As argued here, the practitioners enskilled themselves through their practices into a world of either jin筋/勁 (sinew/power) or qi 氣 (breath/wind).
N° 481
Thomas Morel Giuditta Parolini Cesare Pastorino (2016)
Since its development in economic history, the notion of ‘Useful Knowledge’ has found wide resonance in very diverse fields, engaging scholars working on codified knowledge and scientific practices, material culture and technological innovation, experimentation and policy issues. This preprint presents some of the contributions on this theme delivered at the workshop ‘The Making of Useful Knowledge’ (MPIWG Berlin, 30–31 October 2014).
The meeting aimed at problematizing the apparently coherent picture of useful knowledge that has arisen out of the works of economic historians like Joel Mokyr, and at testing and evaluating the employment of notions of usefulness in the longue durée, moving away from a specific focus on pre-industrial economic growth. Because of this diachronic approach, case studies spanned from the early modern period to the twentieth century.
This volume collects an introduction and six essays by Karel Davids, Jonathan Harwood, Ursula Klein, Thomas Morel, Giuditta Parolini and Cesare Pastorino. Topics of these contributions range from commercial accounting, plant breeding and maritime technology, to mining, mineralogy and applied statistics. The workshop ‘The Making of Useful Knowledge’ was organized by Thomas Morel, Giuditta Parolini and Cesare Pastorino as part of the activities of the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge.
