Abstract Summary
During the 17th and 18th centuries a network of Chinese savants, interested in studying Arabo-Persian natural philosophy strove to reconcile conceptual and theoretical differences between the traditional Chinese and Arabo-Persian treatments of the natural world. For that end, members of that Sino-Islamic network experimented with methods of textual analysis and presentation with an explicit aim of bridging the linguistic, conceptual and theoretical gaps. The proposed talk will juxtapose the history of late imperial China's readership and the history of Chinese physiology, and spotlight the methods of translating and interpreting Arabic and Persian physiological knowledge by a number of Chinese savants during the mid-17th and early 18th centuries. It will focus on the use of taxonomies both as a didactic device and as a representation of the natural order. It will bring to light the challenges faced by translators in the negotiation of this foreign knowledge with the established Chinese categories, and the ways by which they were successful in reconciling the theoretical and conceptual differences. In this talk I will argue that organizing knowledge in rubrics was a translation device utilized by the Chinese translators to localize Arabo-Persian theories and concepts, and situate their scholarship on a par with the various projects of knowledge collecting and organizing that took place in China of the period. At the same time, the use of taxonomies allowed the translators and the promoters of Arabo-Persian knowledge to claim a universal applicability of their translated texts, and their representation of the natural order.
