front cover of The Invention of Madness
The Invention of Madness
State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China
Emily Baum
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.”
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Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.
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front cover of Uncanny Beliefs
Uncanny Beliefs
Superstition in Modern Chinese History
Emily Baum and Albert Wu
Harvard University Press

In the early twentieth century, scholars around the world believed that “superstition” belonged to a bygone era. Yet despite their confident predictions, superstitious beliefs have endured. Perhaps nowhere has the history of superstition been more prolonged and tumultuous than in China. From the late nineteenth century to the present day, intellectuals and politicians have denigrated practices like divination, ancestor worship, and geomancy as unbefitting of a modern nation, and governing regimes have launched a succession of campaigns to replace superstitious thinking with science and rationality. Efforts to eliminate such practices from public life, however, have regularly encountered resistance from people who continue to find meaning in them.

Uncanny Beliefs seeks to understand what “superstition” has meant in modern China—and questions why superstitious thinking has remained such an urgent target of state intervention. Through a range of temporal and thematic perspectives, the chapters in this volume link the study of superstition to the histories of science, religion, gender, state building, and popular culture. In doing so, they collectively broaden our understanding of modern Chinese history by revealing the complex entanglements of superstition with religion, modernity, authority, and everyday life.

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