The ‘book’ as fieldwork: ‘textual institutions’ and nature knowledge in early modern Japan

The analysis of a painting attributed to the rangaku scholar Shiba Kōkan is the occasion to recover the genesis of a stereotypical narrative of Japanese scientific modernization and to survey the role of books in the intellectual life of Tokugawa naturalists. For the practitioners of materia medica (honzōgaku), the knowledge of nature began and ended with, and in between continuously referred to, books – Chinese, Japanese and later ‘Dutch’. Canonical texts gave scholars terminology, taxonomy, philosophical justification and legitimation, but not all books had equal value in affecting scholars’ practices. A precise hierarchy, in fact, organized texts, from canonical encyclopedias to private fieldnotes, into ‘textual institutions’ that encouraged further research at the same time that they regulated and framed scholars’ cognitive claims.