{"id":1198,"date":"2009-03-23T19:40:42","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T00:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=1198"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:37:22","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:37:22","slug":"fields-and-periodization-yes-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2009\/03\/fields-and-periodization-yes-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Fields and Periodization (yes, again)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Vanke, now blogging at The Historical Society&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/histsociety.blogspot.com\/\">THS Blog<\/a>, was looking for some guidance on how to properly divide up the history of the world into fields of study. He <a href=\"http:\/\/histsociety.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/surveys-of-fields.html\">laid out a very ambitious world-wide agenda<\/a>, including Japan and China fields, and asked for feedback. His original China fields were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>to 907 (through Tang)<\/li>\n<li>907-1644 (Song, Yuan, Ming)<\/li>\n<li>1644-1911 (Qing)<\/li>\n<li>1911-<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My comment (on the China stuff; you can <a href=\"http:\/\/histsociety.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/surveys-of-fields.html\">read the whole thing<\/a> or just the Japan stuff <a href=\"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/japan\/2009\/03\/fields-and-periodization-yes-again\/\">at Frog:J<\/a>) was<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On China, I&#8217;m not as familiar with the historiography, but my impression is that there is a lot more scholarship crossing the Ming-Qing boundary than there used to be, and that the Tang isn&#8217;t really separable from the Warring States\/Five Dynasties\/Northern Wei period. I&#8217;d probably break between Tang and Song, or possibly after Song. That latter might work, because then you can take the Yuan-Ming-Qing as a unit, which actually works pretty well. (If you&#8217;re thinking that the Qing is the Early Modern in China, because it&#8217;s chronologically contiguous with the Early Modern in Europe, you have to give that up. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/japan\/2008\/02\/early-modern-periodization\/\">this discussion<\/a> is as good a starting place as any&#8230;.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jeff noticed that I&#8217;d collapsed his system into three fields, among other issues:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For China, if I include Song in the ancient \/ classical field, do I stop in 1129 when the Jin push the Song across the Yangtze, or do I take the classical China field to 1215, when the Mongols take Yanjing?<\/p>\n<p>That leaves me with only three Chinese fields, which seems paltry. If I put Song in a field before Yuan, is there enough from China&#8217;s prehistory to the Song to break that into two fields, and if so, where should I draw the temporal line?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I regrouped &#8212; apparently I can&#8217;t count &#8212; and tried again<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For a four-part China sequence, I think I&#8217;d do a really Early field (up to the fall of the Han), an &#8220;Open Empire&#8221; field (Three Kingdoms to Mongol; see Valerie Hansen&#8217;s excellent textbook), an Early Modern (Ming-Qing) and a 20th century field.<\/p>\n<p>Alternately, since I&#8217;m pushing the third field back to the Ming, you could start the fourth field with the Opium Wars &#8212; I have more or less the same historiographical qualms about that that I do about the 1853 break in Japan, but there are a lot of courses and texts which do just that, still. (I can&#8217;t recommend highly enough Paul Cohen&#8217;s <em>Discovering History in China<\/em> for a good argument against the Opium War break point, among other historiographical insights; many of the theories he engages were very active in the Japanese historiography as well.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jeff wisely ignored my last bit of thinking out loud but seems to think that my four-field sequence makes some sense. If you think I&#8217;m barking up the wrong tree or if you want to see how the rest of the world gets subdivided, <a href=\"http:\/\/histsociety.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/surveys-of-fields.html\">join the discussion<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Vanke, now blogging at The Historical Society&#8217;s THS Blog, was looking for some guidance on how to properly divide up the history of the world into fields of study. He laid out a very ambitious world-wide agenda, including Japan and China fields, and asked for feedback. His original China fields were: to 907 (through&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,129,163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-historiography","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-jk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1198"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4705,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1198\/revisions\/4705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}