People and words: spaces of circulation and political encounters in the experience of “Edizioni Oriente” (1963-1979)

The volume considers various kinds of actors, such as botanists, translators, logicians, linguists, writers, engineers, biologists, Communist Party members, diplomats, philologists, scientists, customs officers, book printers, and sinologists, at a time when their practices and their nascent professional identities have not yet been compartmentalized in relation to each other. They all played an important role in the making of China knowledge between mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Yet, they not only generated knowledge about China, but more often than not used their sinological competences in order to spread knowledge (“Western knowledge”) in China. In order to properly understand these processes, we look at emerging epistemic communities to show that in circulations, knowledge has an “incremental aspect” (Markovits, Pouchepadass and Subrahmanyam, 2003) and entails processes of continuous reconfiguration, renegotiation, and mutation. Crucial to our approach is to emphasize the complexity of the “translation” operations at work in the construction and circulation of China Knowledge. Within the timeframe of our project, the emergence of terminologies is of crucial importance. All contributions focus on the movement of knowledge materialized in the form of texts rather than understanding knowledge as an immobile abstract entity independent of language. We study distributed agency where both human beings and texts are considered as traveling actors or “go-betweens” (Schaffer et al. 2009) vital for the creation, imitation, innovation, and adaptation of bodies of China knowledge.