Carla Nappi, Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China

Carla Nappi, Monkey and the Inkpot : Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Some time ago, the Helsinki University announced a conference on the Sino-Russian relations after 1991. The title of the conference was advertised as The Dragon and the Bear (it was held in November 2011), and I wondered if the organizers realized that by using animals as metaphors for naming these countries, they invoked a very powerful mode of conceptualization and classification: that of a menagerie. Or, once these creatures were metaphorically, i.e. by application of Western scholarship, dissected, examined and, thus, made safe, that of a cabinet of curiosities. It gives a clear idea that that this conference—a product of contemporary scholarly knowledge created by dozens of leading scholars in the field of international relations and political science and legitimized by the authority of Finland’s best university—and, indeed, contemporary academic scholarship in any field is just as an arbitrary scheme of “things” and artefacts, as an early modern intellectual project of a Chinese medical doctor, Li Shizen.

Li Shizhen’s “textual cabinet of natural curiosities,” as Prof. Carla Nappi characterizes Bencao Gangmu, a major source of medical knowledge in Early Modern China, seems to be an excellent example of how a certain branch of scholarship (which was obviously syncretic in Li’s case, combining medicine, natural philosophy and some other disciplines) employs specific modes of logic, visuality, empirical evidence and argumentation in order to shape a wide combination of objects and artefacts into knowledge—or, rather, Knowledge, the one which is socially reliable, credible, trusted and to such a degree that it becomes the basis for reproduction of this kind of scholarship. As Prof. Nappi writes:

This book uses an intimate reading and analysis of Li’s major encyclopedia of materia medica to reveal the epistemic commitments in this textual cabinet of natural curiosities, investigating the ways Li gathered and stored information, distinguished between trustworthy and unreliable sources of knowledge, and identified basic principles of observation and experience. (Nappi, Carla. Monkey and the Inkpot : Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press, 2009. p 7.)

During the course of the book, Prof. Nappi looks at intellectual operations which Li Shizhen used to make sense of the natural world around him and to appropriate it into a coherent body of medical knowledge. This analysis allows for a discovery of what Prof. Nappi calls “modes of logic, or of reasoning” (p. 7) and what French Annalists would have called “mental structures”—those universal patterns of thinking which existed independently of individuals but were employed by them to deal with the surrounding reality. What is important, Monkey and the Inkpot does restrict itself to a study of rational thinking, but goes deeper into examining the ways human bodies, as well as medical gaze and other senses, shaped the creation and change of natural history and medicine in the Chinese society.

My main question to this work (and to its author) is related to the social nature and function of this knowledge. When Prof. Nappi discusses the discipline of natural history, she concentrates on the way it organized the systematic knowledge of the world, but this discussion misses another important question: for what purpose it is produced. Obviously, certain social, cultural and political implications can be found behind the writing, printing, distribution and, finally, reading of Li’s Bencao.

A related question: as Prof. Nappi examines in detail “a complex, living, and conflicted picture of Ming views of the natural world,” (p. 67),  a question arises: to whom these “Ming views” belonged – to the entire society, or they were used in a manner similar to medical knowledge in Early Modern Europe, to discipline the bodies and societies of citizens, or in a somehow different way? Similarly, can Li’s desire to discover the rules which stand behind the metamorphoses in the surrounding world be interpreted as an attempt to control them through knowing them?

Also, I had a feeling—perhaps, an incorrect one—that the “natural history” which includes (through cultural intertextuality) Li’s Bencao has a strong connection to the Chinese cuisine, inspired by those excerpts in which Li discusses the preparation of drugs or when he discusses the taste as an important tool for acquiring knowledge, as in the excerpt below:

Like the “heat” of qi, the five flavors (wuwei) were at best loosely correlated with the flavors or tastes of modern parlance. The five wei were a standard set within which each drug was characterized: sour (suan), salty (xian), sweet (gan), bitter (ku), or pungent (xin). (Nappi, Carla. Monkey and the Inkpot : Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press, 2009. p 63).

Finally, I was curious by the role of aesthetics in structuring Monkey and the Inkpot. Prof. Nappi organizes her material not only through a rational categorization, but—at least, from my perspective—in the way that it looks and reads “nice” (which is an evident advantage of the book).