Cranes, Cultivating a New Knowledge Practice in Late-Chosŏn Korea: Knowledge Transformations Connected by Things

Abstract

Red-crowned white cranes, large migratory birds symbolizing longevity, fidelity, and independence from power across East Asian cultures, came to live in scholar-official households in late Chosŏn. With the residency of this elegant bird in scholarly households around the mid-eighteenth century, a new knowledge practice that took serious interest in things like cranes emerged. This paper illuminates the roles of these highly cross-cultured things in late-Chosŏn knowledge transformation, echoing material turns in various disciplines. Necessitating knowledge to properly possess and accompany them, cranes led to a new scholarly attachment to things. It opened up an unprecedented intellectual attitude that valued curiosity, taste, and facts concerning things and emphasized usefulness of that newly obtained thing-knowledge. Curiosity, taste, facts, and the usefulness of knowledge obtained new meanings in other parts of the world that experienced similar transitions in knowledge practice by and towards things. While delineating the roles of cranes specifically in late-Chosŏn's transformation through the imprints that they left in scholarly acts and works, this paper proposes a new way to connect knowledge transformations in different parts of the globe, via these newly migrating things, moving away from the narrative that requires an origin and transfers.

Keywords:

• Red-crowned white cranes
• Chosŏn Korea
• Sirhak practical studies
• “Material turns”
• diffussionism

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2021S1A5B8096301). I thank Buhm-Soon Park, Sophie Roux, and Holly Stephens for inviting me to discuss this work with helpful audiences at the Center for Anthropocene Studies at KAIST, the École normale supérieure, Paris, and Edinburgh University. I also thank the reviewers, Jongtae Lim and Wen-Hua Kuo for careful readings and very helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For debates about the meaning and scope of the term, see Koo (2018) and Lim (2018).

2 The growth pattern of the red forehead and the protective behavior match the descriptions in modern ornithology (Won 2001).

3 It is notable that the “pine and crane” drawing (松鶴圖) portrays cranes on a pine tree, despite this old understanding about cranes’ staying in flat lands, not in forests or on trees. A systematic comparative investigation of the pine and crane drawings of East Asia would be interesting.

4 The list of scholars with a penchant for things like flowers, birds, cigarettes, mathematics, books, inkstones, knives, rocks, clocks, and other curios seems endless (Jung 2007: 13–23).

5 There is no study on the history of curiosity in China, possibly due to the belief of its being essential human nature. But what is essential can also have a history, and I suspect there were similar transitions in Chinese scholarly attitudes to curiosity, ranging from something worrisome to praiseworthy.

6 I thank Chŏng Myŏnghyŏn at the Forest Garden Management Research Institute, who shared their text and translation of Saving the People.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jung Lee

Jung Lee is an assistant professor at Ewha Institute for the Humanities. She works on history of science and technology with cross-cultural and environmental conditions in mind.