| My dissertation explores Foucault's notion of an episteme in relation to practices of pictorial representation in late Tokugawa, Japan. I focus on a private circle of scholars that took the name Shohyaku sha, founded by the physician Mizutani Hobun in 1810 in the Owari domain. Remaining active throughout Japan's transformation into a modern society, Shohyaku sha pursued hakubutsu-gaku , a conglomeration that joined traditional Chinese and Japanese medicinal concepts and practices with theories of natural history imported from Europe.;Confronted by the infusion of new techniques of knowledge, namely the Linnaean system of nomenclature and its conflicting relationship with traditional canonical texts, the Shohyaku sha aimed to dismantle and reconstruct the evaluative standards in the name of epistemological accuracy. Their extensive involvement in practices of pictorial representation included public exhibitions of illustrations, the employment of "nature printing," publications about the use of the Linnaean system, the circulation and replication of imported publications, and experiments with photographic technology. These efforts attest to the methodological significance pictorial illustration came to have in their process of verifying and upholding epistemological acuity over and beyond the recitation of classical texts. The Shohyaku sha repeatedly employed the concept of shashin, a Chinese pictorial term that came to designate photographic technology in early 1870s, to characterize their pictorial representations. Contrary to the previous studies of Shohyaku sha which undervalue pictorial illustrations by interpreting them as attempts to adapt "Western realism," I posit pictorial representations used in their inquiry as the mediating site for both the contestation and affirmation of the veracity of epistemological standards, and ask what kind of relationship is questioned or assumed between the illustrations characterized as shashin and hakubutsu-gaku epistemology. I argue that their use and production of pictorial representations played a central role in communicating and validating the ontology of particular plants, and thus the process of vetting and reshaping their hakubutsu-gaku discourse.;The goal of my dissertation is to provide a new historical perspective on the formulation of hakubutsu-gaku as a pivotal element that rightfully places it within history of picture-making and picture-viewing in Japan. |
